One of the biggest games in recent history is now even more widely available. Minecraft was just released on Apple TV (see review here on TechConnect), and no, you don't have to control it with that little silver remote. Take full control of the game with this Bluetooth gaming remote from SteelSeries, currently discounted 17% from $60 to $50 on Amazon. The SteelSeries Nimbus remote has all the control sticks, buttons and triggers you or your kids will need to control Minecraft right on your TV. A rechargeable Lithium ion battery provides up to 40 hours of gaming on a charge.

Apart from the flowers, the most exciting attraction at the 1959 Chelsea Flower Show in London was probably Queen Elizabeth II. The most exciting attraction for Queen Elizabeth herself may well have been H.C. Webb & Co.'s radio-controlled electric lawn mower. The machine made its debut there as part of The Times' Garden of Tomorrow, and was on display at the Miracle Garden Exhibition in Paris [above] the following year. Video footage shows the queen and Prince Philip watching the lawn mower with the same sort of bemusement exhibited by people watching robot demonstrations today. The September 1960 issue of Radio Control Models and Electronics called the machine a "lazy gardener's dream of heaven" [PDF].

Back in April, Stanford University professor Oussama Khatib led a team of researchers on an underwater archaeological expedition, 30 kilometers off the southern coast of France, to La Lune, King Louis XIV's sunken 17th-century flagship. Rather than dive to the site of the wreck 100 meters below the surface, which is a very bad idea for almost everyone, Khatib's team brought along a custom-made humanoid submarine robot called Ocean One. In this month's issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, the Stanford researchers describe in detail how they designed and built the robot, a hybrid between a humanoid and an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and also how they managed to send it down to the resting place of La Lune, where it used its three-fingered hands to retrieve a vase. Most ocean-ready ROVs are boxy little submarines that might have an arm on them if you're lucky, but they're not really designed for the kind of fine manipulation that underwater archaeology demands. You could send down a human diver instead, but once you get past about 40 meters, things start to get both complicated and dangerous.

The spacecraft, whose name means stork in Japanese, will deliver some 5.9 tons of supplies, the heaviest load transported by a Kounotori ship. It is the largest among the cargo ships owned by Japan, the United States and Russia. Friday's launch, which followed Russia's failure in the launch of a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress supply ship on Dec. 1, has raised the success rate of Japan's H-2 rocket launches to 97.3 percent. Of the 37 launches so far, all but one succeeded. In addition to water and food, Kounotori 6 will also deliver Japanese-made large lithium-ion batteries to replace batteries used at the ISS, experimental equipment for a new cooling system and equipment to measure cosmic radiation in real time.

Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 concluded its underwater search operations in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said in its latest search update that the vessel "commenced passage to Fremantle to demobilise the Phoenix Remora III Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) before the vessel returns to Shanghai." The agency, which is leading the search for the missing Boeing 777-200, moved from deep tow operations to AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) and ROV operations in October 2016. Dong Hai Jiu 101 vessel has completed 33 dives with the ROV since October 2016. The vessel departed the search area on Dec. 3 and has completed its missions in the search for MH370.

The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found an oil barrel and cable debris but no sign of the missing jet, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Wednesday. The agency, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, released sonar images of the man-made objects that are currently being examined by a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). "The underwater search continues with an AUV searching areas of challenging terrain and an ROV examining a range of sonar contacts which have been previously identified. Over the past week, ROV missions have revealed those contacts to be geological or man-made objects," ATSB said. "Dive 17 identified a contact cluster as geological comprising basaltic rock outcrops on a slope."

The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found man-made objects on the ocean floor, later revealed to be debris from a nearby shipwreck. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the missing plane, said in its operational update Wednesday that sonar from Dong Hai Jiu 101 found the debris. The man-made object turned out to be a metal box likely a part of an ancient shipwreck previously detected during the underwater search. Another site of interest inspected by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) on board the Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 revealed only a rock formation. "Dong Hai Jiu 101 has conducted a total of 13 ROV dives during the swing. Two dives were completed by Dong Hai Jiu 101 in the past week with one sonar contact identified as geology," ATSB said in the statement.

General Electric said on Tuesday it has acquired two tech startups to build its artificial intelligence capability, a move that helps it compete with IBM's Watson product. GE ge said the acquisitions of Bit Stew Systems and Wise.io will expand its Predix platform for industrial internet applications, which connects big machines such as power plants and aircraft engines to databases and analytical software. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed. Berkley, California-based Wise.io has advanced machine learning technology that GE sees "as really well-built for the industrial world," Bill Ruh, chief executive officer of GE Digital, GE's software arm, said in an interview. A branch of artificial intelligence, machine learning allows computers to adapt to new data without new programming.

On June 14, 2016, four researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were preparing to ship a waist-high, ape-like robot named RoboSimian off-site. They had built the bot to rescue people from dangerous situations that human rescuers can't hack. The scientists swapped one lithium-ion battery for a fresh one, then left for lunch to let the new power supply charge. Left alone in the lab, RoboSimian's battery did what such batteries famously do: went boom. Plumes of smoke vented from the robot's exposed torso, followed by a burst of flame.

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