The world's space agencies should scrap plans to send astronauts to the moon and Mars and leave them to explorers and billionaires who can privately fund and risk such adventures, the astronomer royal says. Lord Martin Rees said technical improvements and more sophisticated artificial intelligence meant robotic missions were becoming ever more capable of exploration, and even construction, in space, making it unnecessary for space agencies to front far-flung human missions. "We should not have publicly funded programmes to send people to the moon, still less to Mars," said Rees. "It's hugely risky, hugely expensive, and there's no practical or scientific benefit to sending humans. His comments prompted a robust defence from some experts, who stressed that government-backed spacefaring is a way to project soft power and provided huge inspiration, adding that the private sector could turn space into the "wild west". But Rees argues we should encourage and cheer on explorers and billionaire entrepreneurs who want to leave Earth in search of adventure in the spirit of Shackleton and Scott – both of whom died on Antarctic expeditions. The SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, has long enthused about moving to Mars, noting "there's a good chance of death". While human genetic modification should be heavily regulated on Earth, Rees said, Mars settlers would be free to enhance their children to cope with life on the red planet. Doing so could drive the divergence of the species, he added, raising the unsettling prospect of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs being the seed stock for a bunch of puny post-humans, given the weak Martian gravity. "They will have every incentive to try to redesign themselves and these changes are going to be rapid compared with Darwinian evolution," Rees said. "If something evolves that's rather different from present day human beings, it's likely to evolve from them, not us." Astronauts last set foot on the moon half a century ago. Since then, humans have not ventured further than a few hundred miles into space, mostly to the International Space Station. Space agencies, including from the US, Europe, China and Russia, are now on course to return to the moon. Mars is next in line. The cost is considerable because humans are fragile. The US president, Joe Biden, has requested $26bn (£20.6bn) for Nasa in 2023, with $7.5bn earmarked for the Artemis programme which aims to put the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon as early as 2025. "I think many people support the idea of science in space and assume humans are an essential part of that.

FDA has released a number of documents that could help clarify its expectations for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cybersecurity. These include Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-Based Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) Action Plan, published in January 2021; Good Machine Learning Practice for Medical Device Development: Guiding Principles, published in October 2021; and the just-released draft guidance, Cybersecurity in Medical Devices: Quality System Considerations and Content of Premarket Submissions. The AI/ML action plan provides a "more tailored regulatory framework for AI/ML," explained Pavlovic. She referred to FDA's 2019 discussion paper, Proposed Regulatory Framework for Modifications to Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-Based Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) - Discussion Paper and Request for Feedback, which laid out a "total product lifecycle approach to AI/ML regulations with the understanding that AI/ML products can be iterated much more efficiently and quickly than a typical medical device implant product or something that isn't software based." This is "because there is an opportunity to add additional data to training sets on which the products were originally formulated," she said.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo on Friday confirmed they will strengthen cooperation toward realizing a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" amid China's growing assertiveness in the region and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Widodo said Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations stand ready to build cooperation with their partners, and Kishida, who is on the first stop of his trip to Southeast Asia and Europe, underscored the importance of upholding the rules-based international order. "We are facing many challenges, including the situations in Ukraine, the East and South China seas and North Korea, and maintaining and strengthening the rules-based, free and open international order has become more important," Kishida said during a joint news conference after the summit. Kishida said that based on such understanding, the two sides confirmed they will strengthen cooperation toward realizing a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, an initiative that Japan has been pushing, and the ASEAN Outlook spearheaded by Indonesia. Japan views Indonesia, this year's host of the Group of 20 summit to be held in November and a key economy in Southeast Asia, as a strategic partner sharing universal values such as democracy and the rule of law.

Your smart phone can feel like a lifeline, helping you navigate a new town or delivering an urgent message to a friend. Many people have a funny or embarrassing anecdote about an autocorrected text message or a roundabout route to a destination. But these artificial intelligence (AI) flaws exist on a spectrum, from minor inconveniences to unfair treatment or even risk to human life. The people who create and use these AI technologies are also imperfect; we have our own biases, whether we are aware of them or not. Unconscious bias can influence our decisions and lead to unintended consequences; overt prejudice can result in our unethical and harmful exploitation of AI technologies.

The trustworthiness of neural networks is often challenged because they lack the ability to express uncertainty and explain their skill. This can be problematic given the increasing use of neural networks in high stakes decision-making such as in climate change applications. We address both issues by successfully implementing a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN), where parameters are distributions rather than deterministic, and applying novel implementations of explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The uncertainty analysis from the BNN provides a comprehensive overview of the prediction more suited to practitioners' needs than predictions from a classical neural network. Using a BNN means we can calculate the entropy (i.e. uncertainty) of the predictions and determine if the probability of an outcome is statistically significant. To enhance trustworthiness, we also spatially apply the two XAI techniques of Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values. These XAI methods reveal the extent to which the BNN is suitable and/or trustworthy. Using two techniques gives a more holistic view of BNN skill and its uncertainty, as LRP considers neural network parameters, whereas SHAP considers changes to outputs. We verify these techniques using comparison with intuition from physical theory. The differences in explanation identify potential areas where new physical theory guided studies are needed.

A U.S.-based network of people advocating for an inclusive economy through technology and market innovation say the success of facial recognition depends on both the public and private sectors working hard to engender trust in AI tools. The Financial Services Innovation Coalition, says ordinary people are worried that facial recognition systems will be an oppressive, biased and unblinking eye stripping them of liberty. While some are agitating for a ban on the technology, most have four requests, according to a new report published by the coalition with support from the Security Industry Association. Facial recognition systems should be strictly regulated, and there needs to be transparency on the technology's development, testing, operation and management. Government and industry should be able to demonstrate that the technology can be created and used ethically.

Necessity is often said to be the mother of invention, and the story of Apollo 13 in 1970 is a prime case in point. Watch Ron Howard's film of the accident, and you'll see. After lift-off, an oxygen tank explodes in the side of the spacecraft, depleting not just its oxygen supply, but its power. The ground crew issue guidelines to the astronauts, but those instructions prove to be irrelevant, because they bear no relation to the real-world circumstances. At the Mission Control Center in Houston, a fellow astronaut realizes the problem, and organizes a team to replicate as exactly as possible the conditions being experienced out in space.

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning gain momentum, an increasing number of government agencies are considering or starting to use them to improve decision making. Additionally, COVID-19 has suddenly put an emphasis on speed. In these uncharted waters, where the tides continue to shift, it's not surprising that analytics, widely recognized for its problem-solving and predictive prowess, has become an essential navigational tool. Some examples of compelling applications include those that identify tax-evasion patterns, sort through infrastructure data to target bridge inspections, or sift through health and social-service data to prioritize cases for child welfare and support, or predicting the spread of infectious diseases. They enable governments to perform more efficiently, both improving outcomes and keeping costs down.

President Biden came into office promising to restore the role of science in government after the Trump administration's rocky relationship with scientific advice. A key tool for the White House to implement its ambitious science-related agenda is the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP--a relatively small outfit that oversees policies about science, including budget requests for agencies that conduct science and the coordination of major scientific endeavors across the federal government. Since Biden took office, OSTP has taken on a variety of sorely needed priorities, including reinvigorating government processes for scientific integrity, future pandemic preparedness, and exploring what artificial intelligence means for human rights. But these good causes have been overshadowed by controversies over OSTP's leadership. Politico recently broke a story about billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's close ties to the Biden administration's OSTP.

A robotic car has broken the world speed record, reaching impressive speeds of 192.2mph (309.3kph). The car, developed by a team from the Politecnico di Milano, called PoliMOVE, is fully autonomous and took to the track on the Space Shuttle airstrip at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre this week. During the test drive, the racecar clocked speeds of 192.2mph (309.3kph), 'This test run was exhilarating, and we are thrilled with the world record, but we're also excited by the fact that this data will be made available to all, and the industry will benefit from our work and learnings,' said Professor Sergio Savaresi, team lead from the Politecnico di Milano. The car, developed by a team from the Politecnico di Milano, called PoliMOVE, is fully autonomous and took to the track on the Space Shuttle airstrip at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre this week The racecar previously took to the track on 7 January, during the Indy Autonomous Challenge in Las Vegas – the first head-to-head race between autonomous cars.