In a four-story Bauhaus-style building west of Shanghai, nearly 500 engineers are working to put what they hope will be China's answer to a Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -0.00 % electric car on the road. Their company, NextEV, currently doesn't have anything to sell. It plans to unveil its first electric car in 2017. "Our goal is to build a high-end, high-performance electric car for half the price of a Tesla car," said Li Bin, co-founder and chairman of NextEV. Counting Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY -0.05 % as an investor, NextEV is part of an increasingly crowded industry as the world's biggest auto market welcomes a wave of new entrants--China's deep-pocketed Internet giants.

Reptile sleep patterns might not actually be all that different from our own. Sleep patterns thought to be used only by mammals and birds have now been discovered in a non-avian reptile, the Australian bearded dragon. Finding those patterns, slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in a reptile could dramatically revise scientists' models of how those sleep patterns evolved. And they may have evolved over 300 million years ago. "The status quo, until our study, was that these features of sleep only exist in mammals and in birds," Gilles Laurent, director for the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany and an author of the new paper announcing the findings in the journal Science on Thursday, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview.

"Industry 4.0," or the fourth industrial revolution, can offer both opportunities and risks for the Japanese economy. It is a term to describe the future state of the economy, particularly manufacturing, based on the connectivity of everything, or the "Internet of Things" (IoT). This connectivity includes not only PCs and mobile phones, but also cars, manufacturing equipment and other devices. Although Japan is said to lag behind other developed nations, a recent gathering discussed whether the country could thrive in this new economy. A consultant, an IT service company president, an employee of the same company and a university professor, all of whom are Japanese, delivered presentations and discussed related issues at a symposium organized by the Keizai Koho Center, titled "The Future of Industry (Industry 4.0) and Japan's Economic Growth," in Tokyo on March 18.

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 professor at Stanford University has designed a robotic humanoid diver with articulated hands that is designed to be an underwater avatar, exploring the way a human would-- while its driver remains safely up at the surface. The robot, which measures about five feet long, uses artificial intelligence and also a haptic feedback system to provide its controller with a feel for what the robot is holding. While the front part of the submersible resembles a human, the back part features computers, batteries, and thrusters. The machine, called OceanOne, was designed by Stanford computer science professor Oussama Khatib, who researches autonomous robots. "OceanOne is aimed at bringing a new capability for underwater exploration," Khatib said in a video showcasing the robot's abilities, in which it manipulates objects like a red basket.

And they will soon be doing everything, from taking your pizza orders to scheduling your meetings. This is the future and it's going to be terrible. The rise of the chatbot has been foretold for some time but only in the past few weeks with Facebook's Messenger bots, chat app Kik's bot store and the rise of subversive artbots have they really hit the public consciousness. So how did we get here? At this stage, four months after launch, it seems unlikely that even Peach's developers remember Peach.

There are no spoilers for Her Story in this article. When Sam Barlow was working at Climax Studios in Portsmouth, helping to design the survival horror sequel, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he would get home at night and tinker with a couple of screenplay projects. They were just an exercise, a way to write about things that he couldn't in his day job. But then one night, he realised something: both scripts were about a man just ambling along, seemingly quite happy in life, until a cataclysmic event changes everything. "I was like, 'Oh right, this is me sending a message to myself'," he says. "I realised I needed the impetus to leave the company and go indie. I was writing this stuff to tell that to myself."

April 24 can't come soon enough for Game of Thrones fans eagerly awaiting the premiere of the hit show's sixth season. Naturally, most of us have been speculating wildly about the fate of our favorite characters for the past year, but now there's a clever app to help you withthat. The project, A Song of Ice and Data, was developed by a group of students of a JavaScript course at the Technical University of Munich. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! It looks at 24 features of each character, the list of which includes attributes like their age, the House they belong to, whether they're married and how popular they are based on how many wiki pages link to them.

Microsoft had to face an embarrassing moment when'Tay' an automated chatbox malfunctioned and lead to racist and unpleasant tweets. It was within 24 hours of the launch of Tay when a bulk of offensive tweets were reported. Tay's misbehavior and hurtful tweets were accidental. Tay has the ability to get smarter when people talk. It gets inspired by the language and words used by the people. Tay was in most of such conversations, only repeating what other's wanted it to say.

The robotic geodesic sphere seen inching along Hampstead road in London. Cities like London can often feel like urban jungles with scarce amounts of green spaces. But researchers from the Interactive Architecture Lab at University College London are exploring a future scenario where "cybernetic lifeforms" that are "half garden and half machine" roam our urban cityscapes, co-existing alongside us. Hortum machina B is a robotic geodesic sphere covered in plants. The exoskeleton structure contains twelve garden modules, each of which is planted with native British species.