As per usual, Apple's annual developer's conference followed on the heels of Google's, with the tech giants trumpeting their latest updates for both consumers and coders one after the other. On Monday, CEO Tim Cook's team repeated some of the same tropes and themes as their rivals, from making several Gold State Warriors references to announcing crowd-pleasing features that attempt to minimize taps and maximize our ability to be expressive through our texting machines. But if Google's big point was emphasizing how human-like its technology has become, Apple's was emphasizing how much the company cares about humanity itself -- even if many of the biggest cheers came in response to updates about things like triple-sized emoji. Apple can seem like a exclusive tower made of silicon and secrets, and the company knows that is part of its appeal. Thousands of developers were kept in masses behind guardrails leading up to the keynote.

Apple also introduced a new design language throughout iOS apps including Music, Photos, and News, which unifies some of the options and controls across the apps. Another major development from the developer perspective is the opening of many APIs for control of an incorporation into technologies such as Siri, Photos, Maps, Phone, and Messages. Apple's 3D Touch technology will be greatly expanded, ironically introduced to solve a problem Apple introduced with the iPhone 6s ... the dramatically faster Touch ID means that users often unlock the iPhone too quickly to read notifications. In iOS 10, notifications can respond to 3D Touch to respond to notifications entirely from the lockscreen. The lockscreen also gains a dedicated music-control pane, as well as new slide controls (left to access camera, right to access widgets).

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A 100 million financing round has raised a cyber-security company's value to 1 billion, garnering it membership of the so-called unicorn club. Not much to see here, you might say, given that the list of unicorns grows each day and analysts are divided between those who talk about a new bubble and those who insist that it's traditional companies that are overvalued. In other words, by training a machine to think like a hacker and apply the growing and constantly changing range of tools to try to detect the threats its clients face. The company, which has a long list of corporate clients and income stream very different to the typical startup that bets everything on future growth, is far from unique, and reflects the increasingly clear tendency trumpeted by Kevin Kelly in a 2014 Wired article called "The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world", which argues that the business plans of the next 10,000 startups were easy to predict: "take X and add some artificial intelligence." Those three elements are: the existence of ever-cheaper and more easily available cloud-based computing resources able to substitute the huge and expensive super-computers that used to carry out these complex and multi-dimensional tasks. Then there is the availability of ever-bigger archives of transactional and other types of data produced by the electronic tracing of our everyday lives, and that require immense data bases to train algorithms.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

As expected, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) announced at WWDC today that it is opening access to Siri to third-party application developers, enabling them to integrate their wares with the ubiquitous personal assistant. And the move will almost surely be a big step forward for iOS. Owners of iPhones and iPads make 2 billion requests to Siri every week, said Craig Federighi, the company's vice president of software engineering, during the event in San Francisco today. With iOS 10, which is expected to be released in the next several months, Apple will offer an API (application programming interface) for developers looking to allow users to navigate their apps via Siri. "There are so many things that you can ask Siri, but now in iOS 10 you can do so much more because we're opening up Siri to developers," Federighi said.

Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin wanted to build a machine that could write screenplays. They took hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts, including "Jurassic Park," "Frankenstein" and "Minority Report," and fed them into an artificial intelligence Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM) neural network named Benjamin. They provided the AI with some prompts to help it get started, such as the title "Sunspring," a setting in a future with mass unemployment where young people are forced to sell their blood, and an opening scene in which a man pulls a book from a shelf. Then it was up to the AI system to spin the rest of the story. The resulting script was then filmed with the help of three actors, including Thomas Middleditch from HBO's "Silicon Valley," and edited into the weird, disjointed short film "Sunspring."

Apple, known for its steady stream of slick consumer electronic devices, used its annual developer conference in San Francisco to roll out a raft of millennial-friendly texting tools to enhance emojis, image sharing and add animations to messages. Among a two-hour stream of product announcements at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event, Apple engineers demonstrated the latest update of Apple's smartphone software iOS, which will now let iPhone users add larger emojis, see photos and videos appear in a stream of text messages, add animated effects and "emojify" messages by converting typed words into emoji. Opening the event with a moment of silence for the victims of the weekend's shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, CEO Tim Cook – who has become a leader on gay rights issues since talking about his own sexuality in 2014 – called the attacks a "senseless unconscionable act of terrorism and hate aimed at dividing and destroying". Cook then set about laying out his vision for a future where Apple's software forms the central hub of its customers' lives, helping track their fitness, send love notes, navigate the road and trade pictures of cute dogs. Apple is clearly responding to the voice of the consumer; messages is the most popular app on iOS, and the new features are designed to offer more playful options that replicate some successful third party messaging apps. "We're providing emoji predictions as you type," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.

If Apple's battle with the FBI in the case centered on the iPhone 5C of the San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook showed the world anything, it was that the company is serious about protecting its customers' privacy. Consistent with engaging in a high-profile fight with the law enforcement agency over its insistence on keeping all its customers' data on their iPads and iPhones, Apple has fallen behind the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft in leveraging the power of cloud computing to launch more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) features in operating systems and applications. Apple doubled down on that privacy stance Monday, even as the company revealed it was working on a new technology that would allow it to roll out more advanced AI features while keeping its customers' data safe from prying eyes. Called "differential privacy," this technology enables both the anonymity of data and the spotting of trends, with one privacy expert describing it as "visionary." The firm not only opened its digital assistant Siri to third-party app developers but also made it available on desktop personal computers.

Apple has made a landmark change to its 15-year-old desktop and laptop operating system. OS X has become macOS Sierra. The change was announced on stage in San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium by Apple's Craig Federighi, ditching the naming scheme devised under the watch of founder Steve Jobs on his return to the company in 1997. The OS X nomenclature had reached OS X 10.11 with El Capitan, but Apple's next version will be simply named macOS Sierra, bringing it in line with the naming convention for its mobile and tablet operating system iOS. Apart from a name change, Apple has overhauled iTunes and Apple music, while macOS will finally gain full Siri integration, after Apple's voice assistant was first introduced on iOS with the iPhone 4S in October 2011.