Having spent the past 31 years memorizing an astonishing collection of general knowledge, the artificial-intelligence engine created by Doug Lenat is finally ready to go to work. Lenat's creation is Cyc, a knowledge base of semantic information designed to give computers some understanding of how things work in the real world. Cyc has been given many thousands of facts, including lots of information that you wouldn't find in an encyclopedia because it seems self-evident. It knows, for example, that that Sir Isaac Newton is a famous historical figure who is no longer alive. But more important, Cyc also understands that if you let go of an apple it will fall to the ground; that an apple is not bigger than a person; and that a person cannot throw an apple into space.

The AI chat bot Tay in action, as imagined by Microsoft. Microsoft is testing a new chat bot, Tay.ai, that is aimed primarily at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US. Tay was built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams as a way to conduct research on conversational understanding. The Bing team developed a similar conversational bot, XiaoIce, for the Chinese market, back in 2014. Microsoft execs dubbed XiaoIce "Cortana's little sister," after the Redmond, Washington, company's voice-activated Cortana personal assistant software.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is revising the Energy Star specification for servers to take into account significant system design changes and help buyers make effective purchasing decisions. Over the last few years, server makers have increasingly used coprocessors to boost computing power and given memory a bigger role in processing data. While memory has gotten more power-efficient, coprocessors can suck up a lot of energy. The upcoming, version 3.0 of the Energy Star spec for servers is aimed at helping buyers understand the power-efficiency levels of the new systems. The Energy Star program is already used in computers, appliances, electronics and many other products.

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

Why did our ancestors develop a prominent protruding nose when most primates have flat nasal openings? A new study suggests that our unusual nose may have gained its shape simply as a by-product of other, more important changes in the structure of our face – although other researchers insist that some human noses have been directly shaped by natural selection. One of the many functions of the nose and nasal cavity is to act as an "air conditioner". Together, they make sure that the air an animal breathes in is made warm and humid enough to avoid damaging the delicate lining of the lungs. But Takeshi Nishimura at Kyoto University, Japan, and his colleagues argue that the human nose performs this job poorly.

And thanks to videographer Chad Aaronson--who captured breathtaking drone footage of the graveyard--we now have a unique view of this piece of eerie, forgotten New York. The slow creep of the camera reveals rusted ships littered with debris, in various states of sunkenness.

There are very few data sets telling us what we need to know,

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is one of the'Eight Great Technologies' identified by the UK Government in 2012. A national strategy for RAS innovation from a'RAS Special Interest Group' was published by Innovate UK in 2014. The Government responded to that strategy in March 2015 (PDF 405 KB) and agreed to establish a RAS Leadership Council to oversee its execution. The Special Interest Group also published'The UK Landscape for Robotics and Autonomous Systems' in 2015. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council launched an UK-RAS network, also in 2015.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. One of the biggest challenges in fighting poverty is the lack of reliable information. In order to aid the poor, agencies need to map the dimensions of distressed areas and identify the absence or presence of infrastructure and services. But in many of the poorest areas of the world such information is rare. "There are very few data sets telling us what we need to know," says Marshall Burke, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford University.

Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.