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

THERE is an apocryphal story in technology circles: Google and Facebook could do things with our data that would make our heads spin, but they don't because it would freak everyone out. Apocryphal it may be, but data companies do not have to do much to freak us out. Some people will be extremely unnerved by our revelation that Google's subsidiary DeepMind has access to healthcare data from three UK National Health Service hospitals (see "Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data"). People who use the hospitals now know that DeepMind has intimate – albeit anonymised – details of their medical history, including HIV status, past drug overdoses and abortions. It doesn't help that DeepMind is very unwilling to talk about what it wants to do with this data.

The robot will see you now. For the first time, a robot has successfully operated on live soft tissue without human assistance. The surgeons who developed the robot hope that in two or three years it will be ready to perform routine surgeries, such as removing an inflamed appendix or blocked gall bladder. "It's a proof of concept to show it can be done," says Peter Kim at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC. "We've shown a robot can do soft-tissue surgery, that it can be done autonomously, and that the outcome is better than that of a real surgeon."

The expedition has only just begun and already it is producing some stunning footage of the denizens of Earth's deepest abyss. NOAA's Okeanos research ship will spend the next two months cruising the seas above the Mariana trench, using sonar systems and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore the little known parts of the trench and its surroundings. Footage from the daily dives is being live-streamed, with highlights posted on the expedition site. On 24 April the ROV captured this footage of a beautiful jellyfish (see video above), belonging to the Crossota genus, at a depth of nearly 4 kilometres. On 25 April it filmed a striking, violet sea cucumber swimming above the sea floor (see video below).

Nick Lane is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London who thinks about the big questions of life: how it began, how it is maintained, why we age and die, and why we have sex. Shunning the habit of our times to regard these as questions for evolutionary genetics, Lane insists that our fundamental biochemical mechanisms--particularly those through which living cells generate energy--may determine or limit these facts of life. Lane has been steadily constructing an alternative, complementary view of evolution to the one in which genes compete for reproductive success and survival. He has argued that some of the big shifts during evolutionary history, such as the appearance of complex cells called eukaryotes (like our own) and the emergence of multicellular life forms, are best understood by considering the energetic constraints. Lane's book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution was awarded the 2010 Royal Society Science Books Prize, the top prize in the United Kingdom for books on science. His 2015 book The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? has been described as "game-changing" and "brimming with bold and important ideas." It offers a new, detailed model for how life might have begun by harnessing the incipient chemical energy at deep-sea vents. Bill Gates called The Vital Question "an amazing inquiry into the origins of life."

My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep into a game of checkers one day about three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table. There, a black and white board bristled with far more interesting figures, like horses and castles. There was just one problem: I didn't know how. I dimly remembered having learned the basic moves in elementary school, but it never stuck. This fact vaguely haunted me through my life; idle chessboards in hotel lobbies or puzzles in weekend newspaper supplements teased me like reproachful riddles. And so I decided I would learn, if only so I could teach my daughter. The basic moves were easy enough to pick up--a few hours hunched over my smartphone at kids' birthday parties or waiting in line at the grocery store.

Google will team up with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to develop their self-driving cars, the companies announced Tuesday. Google began working on autonomous driving technology in 2009, though the project wasn't publicly announced until a year later. Chrysler quickly attacked the concept in an ad for the new Dodge Charger: "Hands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company," intones the voice-over. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy." Tuesday's announcement included news that the union will more than double Google's self-driving fleet, adding around 100 models of the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) can autonomously perform 60 percent of bowel anastomosis on pig intestines. Robots are a growing presence in operating rooms throughout the U.S. as surgeons embrace the technology to help them remove damaged organs or cancerous tissue. These systems have improved greatly in recent years but still need hands-on surgeons to guide their instruments and make critical decisions. Turning a robot loose on its own to cut and sew delicate tissue inside a human body would be a massively complex undertaking requiring advanced imaging, sensor and artificial intelligence technologies--not to mention a lot more acceptance from the medical community and federal regulators. But those hurdles have not stopped scientists at Children's National Medical Center's (CNMC) Sheikh Zayed Institute from developing a robotic system that has successfully sutured and reconnected portions of pig intestine in a living animal with little or no human intervention, according to a report in the May 4 Science Translational Medicine. Soft tissue surgeries like this one, which is called intestinal anastomosis, are especially challenging for robotic systems because the tissue changes shape and moves around during the procedures.

Computer-gaming pioneer Arthur Samuel once defined "machine learning" as "a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed." But for some people, the meaning takes a negative turn--as in what happens in dystopian movies after computers have conquered humanity. But the future of machine learning doesn't have to be a doom-and-gloom scenario. Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski--who pursues innovative ideas on the horizon rather than trends of the moment--envisions a more positive outcome for humans and artificial intelligence (AI). Here, he talks about how machine learning is accelerating the progress of robotics, generative design, and the Internet of Things, transforming the way things are designed and made.

General Motors Co. GM -0.16 % and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies' joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry. The plan is being hatched a few months after GM invested 500 million in Lyft, a ride-hailing company whose services rival Uber Technologies Inc. The program will rely on technology being acquired as part of GM's separate 1 billion planned purchase of San Francisco-based Cruise Automation Inc., a developer of autonomous-driving technology. Details of the autonomous-taxi testing program are still being worked out, according to a Lyft executive, but it will include customers in a yet-to-be disclosed city. Customers will have the opportunity to opt in or out of the pilot when hailing a Lyft car from the company's mobile app.