Smartwatches like the Apple Watch may have failed to generate the seismic shift seen with the arrival of the iPhone, but musician and entrepreneur will.i.am The self-confessed geek has launched his own watch-based gadget that can make calls and send texts without needing to be connected to a phone. The device, dubbed'dial', is now available to pre-order in the UK via Three, with prices starting at 22 a month. Will.i.am has launched a watch dubbed dial (shown above) that can make calls and send texts without a connected phone being nearby The Black Eyed Peas frontman first revealed his watch, at a London launch in February, having talked about an earlier version that failed to come to fruition. It is 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS enabled.

The robotic skull of a T-600 cyborg used in the movie Terminator 3. Eduardo Parra/Getty Images hide caption The robotic skull of a T-600 cyborg used in the movie Terminator 3. In his lab at George Mason University in Virginia, Sean Luke has all kinds of robots: big ones with wheels, medium ones that look like humans, and then he has a couple of dozen that look like small, metal boxes. He and his team at the Autonomous Robotics Lab are training those little ones to work together without the help of a human. In the future, Luke and his team hope those little robots can work like ants -- in teams of hundreds, for example, to build houses, or help search for survivors after a disaster. "These things are changing very rapidly and they're changing much faster than we sort of expected them to be changing recently," Luke says. New algorithms and huge new databases are allowing robots to navigate complex spaces, and artificial intelligence just achieved a victory few thought would ever happen: A computer made by Google beat a professional human in a match of Go.

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. In fact, 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.

Without fail, every few months there is yet another breathlessly published blog post or article proclaiming that "SEO is Dead!" Typically this dire proclamation regarding the future of SEO is accompanied by some variation of the following: In reality, SEO will never die. At least not as long as there are search engines. While Google certainly has diminished the amount of real estate for the average search query in the "traditional" organic search result, "natural" search results are critically important for search engines. If, as some have speculated, Google went to a "paid" results-only model, over time I suspect that the average web user would lose trust in the quality of their search results. However, there are by contrast many exciting developments in the field or search that will likely have a huge impact on SEO in the coming years.

How does the image-recognition technology in a self-driving car respond to a blurred shape suddenly appearing on the road? Researchers from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that machines can learn to respond to unfamiliar objects like human beings would. Imagine heading home in your self-driving car. The rain is falling in torrents and visibility is poor. All of a sudden, a blurred shape appears on the road.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the next big evolution for technology is artificial intelligence. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Pichai wrote in the technology giant's annual founders' letter to shareholders. His vision: Over time, computers, whatever shape they take, a mobile device in your hand or a mini computer on your wrist, "will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." Google is far from alone. Artificial intelligence in which Google was a pioneer, is an increasingly crowded field.

Microsoft is the world's most valuable company, with a 261 billion market cap. And an IBM computer named Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, reigning world chess champion and, at the time, the highest-ranked chess player to have ever lived. Though it was not the first time man has lost to machine, it is perhaps the most prominent, highly publicized by IBM and widely covered by the global media. It was viewed as a milestone for AI, the true arrival of computer intelligence. The world celebrated the achievement of technology -- or offered doomsday predictions of a robot revolution.

A computer scientist who helped bring Apple's Siri to the world has invented a method for unlocking an iPhone by talking to it. The technology, revealed in an Apple patent application, would eliminate the need for a separate security step and allow users to be identified by voice at the same time they're telling the device to perform a task. "There are few security measures I can think of that aren't an additional step," said Bryant Walker Smith, an affiliate scholar at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. "Conceivably, you might unlock simply by saying, 'Apple, give me directions to Redmond, Washington,' and there would be no additional steps. Cutting away that one step makes it that much easier to interact with your device as a conversational partner or assistant, where you just ask a question rather than unlock and ask it a question."

The story of self-taught mathematical wizard Srinavasa Ramanujan -- who in 1913 traveled from colonial India to the halls of Cambridge in Britain, shattering stereotypes with his theoretical ingenuity before dying tragically young at 32 -- has already inspired a number of books, plays and films. The latest cinematic treatment, writer-director Matthew Brown's "The Man Who Knew Infinity," is a reverent portrait starring ever-earnest Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as his supportive professor, G.H. Hardy. But the movie, a real-life "Good Will Hunting" of sorts, suffers from being nothing like the cultural outlier Ramanujan was: It's one more respectable British biopic following a formula. Early scenes in Madras show the twentysomething wunderkind as a shipping clerk with a young wife (Devika Bhise), filling books and writing equations in chalk on temple floors but with nobody to impress. When Trinity College shows interest, Ramanujan makes the journey, only to be met with skepticism and institutional prejudice outside the deep bond formed with the admiring, disciplined Hardy, who pushes for proofs that will show his inspirations to be merit worthy.

This exercise represents an intended worst-case scenario for machine learning, as my aim was to test the results on a scarce dataset (n 52). In the Catalan linguistic area in Spain there is no census data about native speakers. Indeed, there is no real useful data about Catalan language from a data science perspective. I focus my attention in this case because until 1950, virtually 100% of the population of the Catalan linguistic area was Catalan native speaker, but from 1950 until now, population has doubled by immigration, that in addition to demographic and political reasons, resulted in Catalan as a minority language in most of its former linguistic area. Currently, we don't have extensive quantitative data to know the real situation or evolution of Catalan language in its territory.