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

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

Modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves and arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed, according to a new study. The research suggests that humans spread out across the globe in four migration events driven by climate change, connected to variations in the Earth's orbit. The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum London told MailOnline the research is'the most comprehensive climate, vegetation and human-dispersal modelling study published so far'. 'While the earliest [migration] wave had only limited further penetration across the rest of Eurasia, they [the researchers] argue that modern humans could have arrived in small numbers in China and southern Europe by about 80,000 years,' he explained.

September 21, 2016 -- NEW YORK – LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced its intent to acquire privately held Intelligize, Inc., provider of the industry standard for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intelligence. The acquisition would expand the LexisNexis securities and M&A offering with new content, innovative tools and analytics while complementing the capabilities of the company's existing securities solution, Lexis Securities Mosaic . Closing of the transaction is subject to certain customary conditions. Based in Reston, VA, Intelligize provides a leading analytics solution enabling legal, academic and business professionals to efficiently mine data and insights from SEC filings, M&A contracts, transactional agreements and corporate governance documents. This enables customers to streamline compliance processes, benchmark peer disclosures, clearly identify market standards, draft documents based on SEC filed precedent and clear SEC reviews in an efficient manner.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI. The Guardian, a British newspaper, warned recently that "we're like children playing with a bomb," and a recent Newsweek headline reads, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out." Numerous such headlines, fueled by comments from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are strongly influenced by the work of one man: professor Nick Bostrom, author of the philosophical treatise Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. Bostrom is an Oxford philosopher, but quantitative assessment of risks is the province of actuarial science. He may be dubbed the world's first prominent "actuarial philosopher," though the term seems an oxymoron given that philosophy is an arena for conceptual arguments, and risk assessment is a data-driven statistical exercise. So what do the data say? Bostrom aggregates the results of four different surveys of groups such as participants in a conference called "Philosophy and Theory of AI," held in 2011 in Thessaloniki, Greece, and members of the Greek Association for Artificial Intelligence (he does not provide response rates or the phrasing of questions, and he does not account for the reliance on data collected in Greece).

In the last year we have seen chat bots take the consumer market by storm and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Chat bots are add-ons for messenger platforms such as Facebook's Messenger platform or Microsoft's Cortana that provide automated, intelligent responses to questions, mimicking a conversation with a real human being. Brands using chat bots aim to provide users with a seamless experience, enabling them to access services and information directly and instantaneously. The potential gains for big brands are undeniable, but could businesses be using chat bots to get ahead too? And if so, what are the big considerations? Recent research shows that customers have already warmed to the idea of using chat bots to communicate with brands, with many believing they hold the key to speed of service and unlocking immediacy in online stores.

It was a heady mix of business and technical sessions on how to take advantage of the power of analytics. Of course there are innumerable applications for analytics, from fraud detection to supply chain optimization to garden variety business intelligence. For this post I'll focus mainly on customer-related applications, and some of the more advanced SAS capabilities discussed at the conference. Let's start with what SAS announced: SAS Viya -- billed as a new open, "cloud-ready" analytics platform. The idea is to bring together the SAS portfolio, built over some 40 years, into one platform that can be used by data scientists and other analytics professionals; business users and IT management; and senior management.

Someone sent me this article by psychology professor Susan Fiske, scheduled to appear in the APS Observer, a magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. The article made me a little bit sad, and I was inclined to just keep my response short and sweet, but then it seemed worth the trouble to give some context. I'll first share the article with you, then give my take on what I see as the larger issues. The title and headings of this post allude to the fact that the replication crisis has redrawn the topography of science, especially in social psychology, and I can see that to people such as Fiske who'd adapted to the earlier lay of the land, these changes can feel catastrophic. I will not be giving any sort of point-by-point refutation of Fiske's piece, because it's pretty much all about internal goings-on within the field of psychology (careers, tenure, smear tactics, people trying to protect their labs, public-speaking sponsors, career-stage vulnerability), and I don't know anything about this, as I'm an outsider to psychology and I've seen very little of this sort of thing in statistics or political science. As I don't know enough about the academic politics of psychology to comment on most of what Fiske writes about, so what I'll mostly be talking about is how her attitudes, distasteful as I find them both in substance and in expression, can be understood in light of the recent history of psychology and its replication crisis. In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth.

Their meaning has been lost in ancient history but the distinctive marks on rocks by our ancestors thousands of years ago provide a unique link to our prehistoric past. Now a new project has been launched in an attempt to finally unravel some of the mysteries of the prehistoric rock art carved into stones in Scotland. Experts are to create a new digital database using 3D scanning to record and study more than 2,000 carvings across the country. Cup and ring marks are a form of prehistoric art found widely through out the world. They consist of a round indentation – the cup – surrounded by a series of concentric circles that look like ripples on water.

Here are some story lines I don't want you to miss today. Donald Trump's defenders say he is an equal-opportunity offender, as likely to go after "low-energy" Jeb Bush or "little" Marco Rubio as "crooked" Hillary Clinton. His critics say, as he might put it, there's something going on with repeatedly criticizing Clinton for not looking presidential and calling into question her strength and stamina. And there was his primary season comment about playing "the woman's card." So what is going on with gender in the campaign?