Robots are one step closer to being able to experience an essential human feeling: pain. Researchers in Germany are currently creating a "nervous system" that would mimic a pain response in robots, allowing them to quickly react and avoid harmful situations. "Pain is a system that protects us," researcher Johannes Kuehn told a conference of engineers last week. "When we evade from the source of pain, it helps us not get hurt." The researchers programmed their robot to experience a "hierarchy" of pain through a variety of different stimuli, such as blunt force or heat.

A new computer project from the U.K. will use big data to predict you when you will die. The four-year research project will take the data collected by health providers and extract from it the life expectancy of the persons therein. What it won't be doing is giving you, the reader, an exact time, date, and cause of death, because that's still science fiction. The research, from the University of East Anglia in the U.K., will use the data it collects to identify trends in death. That is, given the vast pool of data available from health care providers, who like to know everything then can about you, the researchers will be able to see how things like drugs and lifestyle choices affect us.

By 2020, more than five million jobs are expected to be lost to robots and artificial intelligence. And in the next two decades, graduates will be going into jobs that don't yet exist. Anticipating this future, businesses and employers are overhauling their recruitment strategies. Job hopping has replaced the one job, one-employer career, and hybrid jobs are on the rise. Employers want recruits who have strong technical and soft skills such as empathy and flexibility.

Apple is developing an upgrade to its TV box to turn it into a'Siri speaker' for the home. The move would put Apple in a three way battle with Amazon and Google. It is also set to allow app makers to access its smart assistant, it has been revealed. The move would put Apple in a three way battle with Amazon and Google. It is unclear whether Apple could also release a separate, standalone speaker.

Even though we use our iPhones all day, every day, there are still a handful of features that are relatively unknown. Some of these features are buried in the Settings menu, while others are hidden in plain sight. Plus, there are a few things Siri can do for you that you may not know about. You can respond to texts directly from your lock screen by pulling down on the notification drawer and swiping over to the left on the text notification. You'll see a "Reply" option, and tapping it will let you type a response without having to unlock your iPhone.

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

If you're a soldier, firefighter or even a hiker, a new soft robotic suit could one day help you carry hefty loads, a new study finds. The wearable robot, or exosuit, reduces the amount of energy used while carrying a heavy weight by about 7 percent, on average, the researchers found. The suit also reduced the amount of work done by the hip, knee and ankle joints, all without affecting a person's stride, the researchers said. "The goal wasn't to create a system to give someone superstrength, but rather to provide small levels of assistance during walking over a long period of time, with the goal of reducing fatigue and the risk of injury," said study senior researcher Conor Walsh, a professor at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Unlike a rigid exoskeleton or even a flashy Iron-Man-like suit, the exosuit Walsh and his colleagues built consists of textiles and soft materials that attach to a person's legs, waist and back.

As we see the rise of robotics for healthcare creep into the foreground, from Paro the cuddly seal cub invented to comfort elderly Japanese to the Singaporean robots exercising octogenarians, what about therapy? Even in those countries with the most developed healthcare systems, services are already stretched thin -- sometimes it takes weeks to get an initial assessment of your mental health. What if, instead, you could just log in and immediately start talking to a bot? Therapy bots are already well into development. SimSensei is currently in trials with American war veterans, tasked with treating PTSD, a wildly volatile illness.

Los Angeles, California – Indie developer and computer vision engineer, Mustafa Jaber, is pleased to announce the release of Capture Caption Lite, an AI-based app developed for iOS and Android devices. With the Capture Caption app, users can snap a photo with their smartphone or iPad and artificial intelligence will generate a word cloud using cutting-edge computer technology. These word clouds can be then downloaded to the user's image library and shared across multiple social media platforms. The brainchild of electrical engineer and image processing expert Mustafa Jaber, the app uses an artificial intelligence platform that derives information from images. This program understands the content of any image by using powerful machine-learning models, which can quickly classify images into thousands of categories.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.