Is Honda's walking robot Asimo marrying Pepper, the chattering robot from SoftBank? Automaker Honda Motor Co. and internet company SoftBank said Thursday they will work together on artificial intelligence to develop products with sensors and cameras that can converse with drivers. Asimo, first shown in 1996, walks, runs, dances and grips things. Pepper, which went on sale last year, doesn't have legs but is programmed to recognize mood swings in people it interacts with. Major automakers and technology companies are interested in robotics to improve driving safety and comfort.

The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it's actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands. On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions -- an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind. Scientists will rely on this guide as they attempt to understand virtually every aspect of the brain, from how it develops in children and ages over decades, to how it can be corrupted by diseases like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. "It's a step towards understanding why we're we," said David Kleinfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research.

Everyone knows about the Turing Test. It was first proposed by Alan Turing in his famous 1950 paper'On Computing Machinery and Intelligence'. The paper started with the question'Can a machine think?'. Turing noted that philosophers would be inclined to answer that question by hunting for a definition. They would identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for thinking and then they would try to see whether machines met those conditions. They would probably do this by closely investigating the ordinary language uses of the term'thinking' and engaging in a series of rational reflections on those uses. At least, Oxbridge philosophers in the 1950s would have been inclined to do it this way. Turing thought this approach was unsatisfactory.

Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford, poses inside the 2015 Ford Mustang on the set of Good Morning America on December 5, 2013 in New York City. Former Ford CEO Alan Mulally, who led Ford's turnaround during the Great Recession, said he has stayed involved in both the automotive industry and the aerospace industry as consultant and as a member of the board for both Google and 3D printing company Carbon 3D. "It really is amazing -- the convergence between digital technology and everything that is being touched by it," Mulally told the Detroit Free Press in a rare interview. Mulally changed the culture at Ford from internal divisions and back-stabbing to a unified team that embraced Mulally's "One Ford" overhaul plan. On Thursday night Mulally will be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in metro Detroit, along with pioneering consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Roy Lunn, godfather of the original Ford GT40. "I think his greatest achievement was the culture shift he brought to Ford," Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford said in an e-mail to the Free Press.

A live action Pokemon movie is to begin production in 2017, Legendary Entertainment has confirmed. The film will focus on Detective Pikachu - a new character in the universe, introduced through a video game in Japan earlier this year. The news comes following the huge international success of the Pokemon Go game in recent weeks. Its popularity led to a 25% jump in shares for Nintendo - part owner of the brand. Pokemon was first released as a video game in 1996 and led to an animated TV series and film franchise, plus merchandise including trading cards - which became a craze in UK schools in the early 2000s. It is not the first film Legendary Entertainment has produced that is based on a video game - the company recently released Warcraft in cinemas, based on the successful role playing game World of Warcraft.

It has attempted to transform the car industry with its electric vehicles, but now Tesla has its sights set on developing electric trucks and buses that can drive themselves. Elon Musk, chief executive of California-based Tesla Motors, has unveiled his new'Master Plan' for the company to outline what he hopes to develop over the next decade. His vision includes extending Tesla's range of electric vehicles to include trucks for hauling cargo around the country and public transport. Elon Musk has unveiled his new master plan for his electric car company Tesla, which includes introducing new forms of electric transport like trucks and buses. Elon Musk has set out a new four point plan for the future of its electric car company.

Artificially intelligent machines are no longer confined to science fiction novels but are an accepted part of everyday life. While we frequently interact with chatbots, such as Siri, there is now a serious push to make these computer-based'personalities' more trustworthy and likable. Simone Stumpf, senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at City University London, believes the key may actually be to make them less human. Microsoft wants to join the rest of the software giants in the AI game, but it just keeps striking out. Weeks ago the firm's lovable teen chatbot turned into a Hitler supporting racists and its most recent attempt, CaptionBot hasn't lived up to its potential either.

When most people look at a piece of paper, they see an unremarkable sheet of flat white material. When Polly Verity looks at piece of paper, she sees potential. Verity specializes in transforming single sheets of paper into surprising three-dimensional tessellations, a tradition of paper-folding called curved-crease origami sculpture with origins in Germany's seminal Bauhaus school of art and design. It was at the Bauhaus in the 1920s that famed artist and designer Josef Albers taught a preliminary course in "paper study." The course was designed to help students approach the humble material with its inherent limitations--its stiffness, its thinness--in mind, and to allow these limitations to inform their creativity.

Machine learning is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for many large companies. Everyone has, for sure, heard about Google's AI algorithm beating the World Champion in Go, as well as technologies like RankBrain, but machine learning does not have to be a mystical subject relegated to the domain of math researchers. There are many approachable libraries and technologies that show promise of being very useful to any industry that has data to play with. Machine learning also has the ability to turn traditional website marketing and SEO on its head. Late last year, my colleagues and I (rather naively) began an experiment in which we threw several popular machine learning algorithms at the task of predicting ranking in Google. We ended up with an assembly that achieved 41 percent true positive and 41 percent true negative on our data set.