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

When you think about it, the tech world has a lot in common with old-time religion. There are impassioned camps -- think Android vs. iOS or Mac vs. Windows -- devoted to a particular software or hardware platform. And tech conferences that attract the faithful often embrace the fevered intensity of a tent revival. This isn't a bad thing, of course, as a little enthusiasm never hurt anybody. And it makes sense that major companies, including IBM, hire charismatic, persuasive individuals as evangelists to spread the word about their products and services.

Experts in computer science and medicine explored issues related to the ethical use of artificial intelligence in medicine during a panel discussion at the University of Toronto. The University of Toronto (U of T) hosted a panel discussion Tuesday on the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine. Integrating AI successfully into the nuanced setting of patient and doctor interaction and communication creates intriguing challenges for researchers. Natural language expert Graeme Hirst says a medical AI would have to talk to patients in language used in the real world and deal with all issues of complex conversation and health communication. Hirst has developed methods for detecting cognitive decline, including Alzheimer's disease, by examining linguistic changes in a person's writing over time.

Silicon Valley is seeking poets, writers, comedians, and other artistic people to help humanize the personalities of artificial intelligence tools. Demand for chatting virtual assistants and other artificial intelligence (AI) products is creating favorable job prospects for writers, poets, comedians, and other people of artistic persuasion in Silicon Valley. The industry is tapping them to engineer the personalities of AI tools to make them capable of seamless interaction with people. AI writers are tasked with imbuing the AIs with natural-seeming conversational capabilities. Writers for virtual assistants must typically concoct a backstory for these assistants, and inject personality quirks into even the most mundane operations.

John Markoff recently wrote in the New York Times, "Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes. Actually: You won't be obsolete for a long time, if ever, most researchers say. In March when Alphago, the Go-playing software program designed by Google's DeepMind subsidiary defeated Lee Se-dol, the human Go champion, some in Silicon Valley proclaimed the event as a precursor of the imminent arrival of genuine thinking machines. The achievement was rooted in recent advances in pattern recognition technologies that have also yielded impressive results in speech recognition, computer vision and machine learning. The progress in artificial intelligence has become a flash point for converging fears that we feel about the smart machines that are increasingly surrounding us.

Artificial intelligence has more than a few practical uses. Whether this impressive technological breakthrough is convincingly explaining the meaning of life or plotting the untimely end of the world, making a robot that can think like a human has been man's greatest achievement… along with the Internet and Nutella-flavored ice cream. And one Taiwanese startup is looking to cash in on this technology by using it to create videos out of nothing more than an article's URL. GliaStudio, based out of Taipei, Taiwan, was launched in 2015. Their goal was to corner the market on the new necessity in media production and content development: video.

Imagine that you are searching for a brown leather sandal online. You know what it should look like, but don't know how to describe it. You search "brown sandal" in Google, which serves up many results--but none of them are it. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

Get ready for all sorts of updates and announcements from Facebook. The social network kicks off its annual developers' conference, F8, on Tuesday and the biggest topics on the agenda will likely be Messenger and video. Since Facebook first started letting businesses integrate with its chat app, Messenger, at last year's conference, it has continued to give companies more ways to use it to communicate with potential customers. Facebook's thesis is that some people hate talking on the phone and would rather do something -- buy a shirt, order an Uber, make a dinner reservation, check their flight status -- within a chat interface. So, it wants to turn Messenger into a full-on platform for retrieving information and getting things done through natural-seeming conversations with businesses.

Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom's southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions--and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself. "It's well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later," Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. "The question is, when exactly?" Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times.

Seven weeks ago, Google made waves in the robotics world with a human-like robot that could walk on uneven terrain, lift boxes and get back up after falling. Such abilities hadn't been seen in one robot. Now Google (formally known as Alphabet) is at it again. Another robot has emerged from X, the company's experimental labs, roaming outdoors on two legs, according to a new video that surfaced from a conference in Japan. While experts call it an impressive demonstration of balance and two-legged walking, it remains unclear what real-world uses Google or anyone could have with a legged robot in the near term. "It will still be awhile before we see these robots in a context outside a very compelling demonstration video," said Brian Gerkey, chief executive of the Open Source Robotics Foundation.