It is the first company--the first anybody to send a rocket to space and then land it on a floating barge. Sixth time is the charm, apparently. Or at least, anyone with an interest in low cost access to space hopes it will. At 4:43pm ET, the nine engines on board the Falcon 9's stage 1 rocket began pushing 1.53 million pounds of thrust against Earth. After about two and a half minutes, and several hundred thousand feet of elevation gain, the first stage detached and began a controlled fall back to Earth, arcing towards the football field-sized barge (charmingly-named "Of Course I Still Love You") in the Atlantic Ocean.

A Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, carrying more supplies to the International Space Station. SpaceX was able to land its rocket on a barge April 8, 2016, about 200 miles off the shore of Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Photo: SpaceX) CAPE CANAVERAL -- The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket almost hit the bull's eye Friday, landing on a barge about 200 miles offshore. Though not exactly in the center of the platform, the maneuver was enough to keep the equipment from getting wet in the Atlantic Ocean. The experiment was the first successful landing. The booster possibly could have returned to land, like one did in December, SpaceX said.

A designer in Hong Kong made a robot in the form of actress Scarlett Johansson, and Margot E. Kaminski sees a host of interesting legal and ethical issues emerging from its creepy-beautiful self. To start with, who has the right to make a robot in the shape of an existing person? Is this a protected form of expression? "What if instead of making the Scarlett Johansson robot without the actress's permission," Kaminski asks, "a robot manufacturer legally licensed her face and trotted out millions upon millions of ScarJos to serve as personal assistants?"

It is exactly the latter question that usually causes the whole grand edifice of digital immortality and consciousness upload to fail. The big idea that what we perceive is not real and that all is pure mind was articulated by Plato in the 5th century BC. He described humanity living in chains inside a cave, and able to seeing only shadows on the walls of the cave that we mistake for reality. Plato suggested that only by "awakening" could someone discover the truth, and break free of the illusionary cave. Plato's ideas have informed much of Christian theology.

The team of three so-called "suit wranglers" told me to relax as they strapped me into the contraption, but the heart rate monitor attached to my finger gave away the fact that I was a little uncertain as to what I had gotten myself into last week. "Do you normally have a high heart rate?" one technician inquired. During a visit to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City last Thursday, I had happened across a preview of a new exhibit that was opening to the public the next day, Friday, April 1. The exhibit, The Genworth R70i Aging Experience, featured the just-unveiled Genworth R70i Age Suit – an augmented reality suit that simulates the sensory impairments that come as people age. The high-tech suit I was being strapped into was created by Applied Minds co-founder and inventor Bran Ferren, who partnered with Genworth Financial to create it with the goal of sparking a conversation among young people about aging and senior care.

List comprehension is powerful and must know concept in Python. Yet, this remains one of the most challenging topic for beginners. With this post, I intend help each one of you who is facing this trouble in python. Do you know List Comprehensions are 35% faster than FOR loop and 45% faster than map function? I discovered these and many other interesting facts in this post. If you are reading this, I'm sure either you want to learn it from scratch or become better at this concept. Both ways, this post will help you.

At your day job as a professional code Googler – I mean developer – you probably search for quick snippets multiple times a day to find the best way to perform a particular task. Almost always as developers we end up on Stack Overflow or Mozilla Developer Network, but now Microsoft's Bing has given us something even better: executable code directly in search results. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. Thanks to a collaboration with HackerRank, if you search for something like string concat C#, you'll get an interactive code editor with a result that can be run directly from that page to see how it works. It's a seriously fantastic feature that I hope Google adds soon – I'm not sure I'd switch search engine for this, but I'm incredibly jealous.

There's a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as Nao, as creepy as Spot and BigDog or as anthropomorphic as Atlas, it might be more practical than all of them. It walks on two legs, but not like a man, or even a bear. This one, designed by Alphabet-owned Schaft Inc., has its own uniquely robotic form of locomotion. A video then played showing robots like the one on stage, but different -- but all with a few things in common. Most important has to be the walking system.

When Dennis R. Mortensen hired his founding team members at x.ai, he pitched them by illustrating his vision of a world where everyone has a personal assistant to schedule their meetings. Recognizing the complexity of the challenge, he concluded by saying: "We may die trying." "It's a great setting to hire qualified people," Dennis says, recounting the late days of 2013. "We're working on something that is clearly very hard, to the extent that we might not make it, but it's not impossible." That's the sweet spot, he says.

Over the last year, in my spare time, I've built several small machine learning apps. For example, one that predicts the San Francisco fog at a neighborhood by neighborhood level. I have ideas for other things that I want to build, but at a much larger scale, for example large recommendation systems off Twitter's API. I've tried looking for tutorials or courses on how to build scalable machine learning apps, but I feel like I'm drowning in a lot of stuff I don't understand -- distributed architecture, MapReduce, Spark to name a few. Suggestions for the best way for a beginner to scale to get started?