Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.

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

The way to make a social home robot seems to be pretty standardized: basically, you cram a tablet computer into a cute robot body with some degrees of freedom and do your best to make sure that your voice recognition and conversation algorithms are as good of an experience as you possibly can, using a screen to help you out when necessary. This is fine, if you can get it to work well, but there's a concern that it's just going to turn into an experience that's essentially talking to a gussied-up version of your phone. A group of researchers including Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, Benny Megidish, Oren Zuckerman, and Sung Park from IDC Herzliya, Cornell, and SK Telecom have developed a prototype social robot called Vyo. Vyo is "a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices." Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that's totally, adorably different.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 9 (Reuters) - Apple Inc announced a series of long-awaited enhancements to its App Store on Wednesday, but the new features may not ease concerns of developers and analysts who say that the App Store model - and the very idea of the single-purpose app - has seen its best days. The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process. The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps. The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap.

Throughout history, artists and scientists have sought to understand what it means to be human and create machines in our own image. Soon, an important member of the the remarkable 500-year history of humanoid robots could be brought back to life. London's Science Museum has launched its first Kickstarter campaign, which aims to raise funds to rebuild Eric – the UK's first robot. The Science Museum hopes a lost robot named Eric will be part of the exhibition (pictured here before it disappeared). It was the UK's first humanoid and toured the world wowing audiences The forthcoming show at London's Science Museum will include a collection of more than 100 robots from a 16th-century mechanical monk to robots from science fiction and modern-day research lab.

One of the biggest mysteries we'll need to solve for driverless cars is how to assign liability in an accident. Some experts think car manufacturers will start taking on more responsibility, but many insurance companies are still loath to touch the subject because of the various state laws that risk complicating the picture. But at least one insurer seems to sense an opportunity where others fear to tread. In what appears to be an unprecedented move, a British insurance company has begun offering a special policy designed for autonomous and partly automated vehicles. In theory, you could use this on your Google driverless car or your Tesla that's equipped with autopilot.

Pop culture wants us to fear the artificially intelligent robot: The titular "Terminator" characters goes back in time to kill a mother and her child. Cylons of "Battlestar Galactica" fame destroy Earthly civilization and, bloodthirst not slaked, pursue the remnants of humanity through space. Today's artificial intelligence researchers are not, in fact, on the cusp of creating a doomsday AI. Instead, as IBM executive Guruduth Banavar recently told The Washington Post, current AI is a "portfolio of technologies" assigned to specific tasks. Such programs include software capable of defeating the world's best Go players, yes, but also isolated mundanities like the Netflix algorithm that recommends which sitcom to watch next.

When subatomic particles smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they create showers of new particles whose signatures are recorded by four detectors. The LHC captures 5 trillion bits of data -- more information than all of the world's libraries combined -- every second. After the judicious application of filtering algorithms, more than 99 percent of those data are discarded, but the four experiments still produce a whopping 25 petabytes (25 1015 bytes) of data per year that must be stored and analyzed. That is a scale far beyond the computing resources of any single facility, so the LHC scientists rely on a vast computing grid of 160 data centers around the world, a distributed network that is capable of transferring as much as 10 gigabytes per second at peak performance. The LHC's approach to its big data problem reflects just how dramatically the nature of computing has changed over the last decade.

Raise your glass to outstanding women in advertising, marketing, and media in the U.K. and continental Europe. Advertising Age and Women in Advertising & Communications London (WACL) recognize an inaugural class of female executives who are changing the marketing landscape. Amazon.com is testing a new service that will make it easier for businesses to run artificial intelligence software on computers rented from the company, people familiar with the situation said, stepping up competition with Alphabet unit Google, Microsoft and International Business Machines. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud business, rolled out a limited offering in this area last year. The new service will let businesses run a wider range of AI software on Amazon's computers, leading to more powerful applications capable of tasks like pattern recognition and speech transcription.

By all accounts, Elon Musk may be one of the smartest people alive. But he surprised more than a few people this week at the 2016 Code Convention in California when he stated his belief that we are not really real, but rather computer generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization's video game. Responding to a question from journalist Josh Topolsky, Musk said, "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photo realistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now.