Fiddling with your phone while playing with your baby could lead to them growing up with a shorter attention span. That's the warning from a group of psychologists who found toddlers find it hard to focus if their parents or other caregivers are distracted while playing with them. The study is the first to show a direct connection between how long a caregiver looks at an object and how long an infant's attention remains focused on that same object. It may also serve as a warning to many parents who juggle work and childcare by keeping a near constant eye on their phone. 'The ability of children to sustain attention is known as a strong indicator for later success in areas such as language acquisition, problem-solving and other key cognitive development milestones,' said Chen Yu of Indiana University who led the study.

Professor Scherer's team analysed the interviews using computer software that identified both verbal and non-verbal cues. Verbal content, such as mentioning death, repeated references to the past or heavy use of first-person pronouns, such as I, me and myself, were all common in the speech of suicidal patients. But what was surprising to researchers were the nonverbal cues. The found marked differences between the way suicidal and non-suicidal subjects spoke. Suicidal subjects had breathier speech, differences in pitch and other subtle changes in the tenseness or harshness of their voices, the experts wrote in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

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

Second beauty contest, where humans are judged by Artificial Intelligence Beauty.AI 2.0 launches. Robot judgement day is set for 01.08.2016. People are encouraged to download the free Beauty.AI 2.0 mobile app in either the Google Play market or Apple App Store and algorithm developers should reach out to the organizers through a form on the http://beauty.ai/ Beauty.AI 1.0 was covered by the leading reporters and journalists at New Scientist, Techcrunch, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Yahoo! Beauty.AI 2.0 will provide valuable prizes for both human competitors and robot jury members.

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

"Stories don't interest me," Geoff Dyer told the Huffington Post in 2014. That this is true is evident in his new collection of essays, "White Sands." Which doesn't mean that "White Sands" isn't a good read, because it is. You must, however, get used to Dyer's tone, which is persnickety and unenthusiastic. His virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesn't pretend to be heading anywhere, but then "White Sands" turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving.

Humanity is in a precarious state and never more than a hair's breadth from being wiped out, if the hordes of Doomsday fanatics are to be believed. But while many scenarios may seem in the realm of fantasy, a new report suggests there are a number of global catastrophic risks which we could do with preparing for much better. According to the report, top of the list for 2016 are climate change-related catastrophes, natural pandemics - such as bird flu - and nuclear war. Countdown to extinction: A new report detailing the global catastrophic risks facing humanity lists nuclear war (stock image) and climate change among the top threats that could wipe out up one tenth of the world's population. Other risks which make the list for 2016 include man-made virus, failure of geo-engineering - such as adding iron to oceans to absorb atmospheric carbon - as well as the threat of catastrophic disruption from artificial intelligence. The report suggests that a person may be five times as likely to be wiped out in an extinction event as a car crash.

Deep Learning allows computational models composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-art in speech recognition, visual object recognition, object detection, and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. Deep learning discovers intricate structure in large datasets by using the back-propagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change its internal parameters that are used to compute the representation in each layer from the representation in the previous layer. Deep convolutional nets have brought about dramatic improvements in processing images, video, speech and audio, while recurrent nets have shone on sequential data such as text and speech. Representation learning is a set of methods that allows a machine to be fed with raw data and to automatically discover the representations needed for detection or classification.

New supersharp photos of Mars show Europe's long-lost Beagle 2 lander, ancient Red Planet lake beds and snaking rover tracks in unprecedented detail. Scientists "stacked and matched" photos captured over the years by NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using new machine-vision methods, creating images in which features just 2 inches wide can be seen. This resolution is five times greater than MRO or any other instrument orbiting Earth or Mars had been able to achieve, researchers said. Further use of this technique could help space agencies select safe landing sites for future Mars missions, search for pieces of other lost Red Planet hardware and perform a variety of other science work, they added. "We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures," study co-author Jan-Peter Muller, of University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement.

Amazon said that a review of its entire U.S. staff found that women's compensation in 2015 was 99.9% of men's in equivalent jobs. Further, minorities make 100.1% of what white workers earn. SAN FRANCISCO -- Hear an echo? Amazon's first quarter results are likely to recall the themes of previous quarters, including the march of Prime and its cloud services business. Last year was an excellent one for the Seattle-based retailer.