Despite worsening political ties between China and India, a Chinese automaker is making a large investment in the subcontinent. Great Wall Motors, or GWM, China's largest maker of sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, has signed a memorandum of understanding to invest $1 billion to upgrade an auto plant in India's western province of Maharashtra. The plant, a former General Motors (GM) facility located near the city of Pune and is expected to generate jobs for 3,000 people. "This would be a highly automated plant in Talegaon [a town near Pune] with advanced robotics technology integrated in many of the production processes," said Parker Shi, managing director of GWM India. GWM becomes the second large Chinese automaker to enter the Indian market after MG Motor, a unit of SAIC Motor Corp., did so last year.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has enlisted Airbus to help it build a Mars rover called'Fetch' that will find and retrieve rock samples on the Red Planet. The defence and space arm of the aerospace corporation won the upcoming phase of the contract to develop the robot as part of the'Mars Sample Return' mission. Fetch will travel across the surface of the Red Planet in 2028 collecting packaged rock samples left behind by the NASA's Perseverance rover. The four-wheeled ESA rover will ultimately transport these samples to a'Mars Ascent Vehicle' which will carry them into orbit for collection by another ESA spacecraft. The European Space Agency (ESA) has enlisted Airbus to help it build a Mars rover called'Fetch' that will find and retrieve rock samples on the Red Planet.

A deadly new virus circling the globe makes many people more anxious. The pandemic's psychological toll can be particularly weighty for people with an existing mental health condition. One 25-year-old on the US East Coast seeing a therapist for help with anxiety found additional support from an unexpected source: a chatbot. "Therapy twice a month was fine before, it's just now sometimes I have days where I feel like I need something extra," says the person, who identifies as gender nonbinary, and asked to remain anonymous. Their budget didn't allow more frequent therapy sessions, making them receptive when a friend mentioned Woebot, a chatbot built on Stanford research that delivers a digital version of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The space race of our time is the quest for domination in artificial intelligence. As a result, countries around the world are investing significant resources to build and mature their AI capabilities. They are also crafting strategic national plans about how and where to invest in AI. Taken together, these plans provide a snapshot of the global state of AI investments and how national governments are thinking about how to best utilize their resources. By studying 34 AI strategic plans of more than 1,700 pages, we have found that governments are failing to plan for operational investments, continue to be far more aspirational than practical in their planning, and are failing to consider funding realities.

Legend has it that when an emperor asked an inventor to name his reward, the inventor asked the emperor for payment in the humble grain of rice, giving the inventor the total gained by doubling a single grain of rice over a 64-square chessboard. In the end, the final squares had exponential mountains of rice. The velocity of technology advancement, especially for the manufacturing industry, is no different--it's exponential. Despite its lower digital maturity and research and development (R&D) investment than other industries,1 the manufacturing industry has been successful in gradually furthering its innovation agenda by increasing its patent-based innovation intensity to build new product and service capabilities. Continuous advancement will likely become critical to the success in an ecosystem that industry leaders believe is nearing the "second half of the chessboard."2

"Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."1 The now famous words were transmitted through space down to Houston after the Apollo 13 crew attempted to stir the cryogenic oxygen tanks. The otherwise-standard procedure caused a series of electrical shorts and subsequent problems, leaving the command module unable to generate power, provide oxygen, or produce water. Bounded by space thousands of miles from Earth, the situation was dire for the Apollo 13 crew. NASA engineers on the ground had very little information. The crew shared their observations, and the spacecraft was transmitting some data, but these inputs didn't give engineers on the ground a perfect picture. To better understand what had happened and what consequences the crew faced, the NASA team in Houston used a mirrored system of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, allowing them to duplicate the situation as accurately as possible.

Google has said it is exploring why a picture of Winston Churchill went missing from a search list of former UK prime ministers, amid controversy over the legacy of the wartime leader. The company apologised on Sunday morning for the disappearance of the picture from its "knowledge graph" listing, adding that many photos of Churchill could still be found on its search engine. In a statement made on Twitter, Google's search liaison team said: "We're aware an image for Sir Winston Churchill is missing from his Knowledge Graph entry on Google. This was not purposeful and will be resolved." The problem, which was fixed at around midday on Sunday, was allegedly not specific to Churchill, with a similar problems occurring with images of former prime ministers Harold Wilson, Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin.

Google has been accused of a conspiracy and a cover-up over a disappearing image of Winston Churchill – but the affair appears to have been both more complicated and innocent than it first appeared. Outcry was prompted among some specific people on social media over the weekend when it emerged that searching for Winston Churchill no longer showed an image of the former prime minister, and instead just text responses to the query. The search company was attacked by people including culture secretary Oliver Dowden, who expressed his "concern" that the image had been removed for sinister reasons. It disappeared amid ongoing debate about the place of statues in public life, racial inequality, and Churchill's legacy, leading some to suggest the decision was a political move. But Google said it was in fact the result of a bug that occurred when Google tried to change rather than remove the image.

The EU has opened a major investigation into Apple over concerns that it uses its platforms unfairly. The EU commission will pursue antitrust investigations against the company over its App Store and Apple Pay products, which critics argue have stifled competition. The Commission said it was investigating Apple Pay over allegations the tech giant wields its control over the Pay platform to force developers into using it over others. It said a preliminary investigation had raised concerns that "Apple's terms, conditions, and other measures related to the integration of Apple Pay" may "distort competition and reduce choice and innovation". In addition, the EU Commission announced it had opened a second investigation into concerns that the firm's App Store restricts developers from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative purchasing possibilities, instead pushing "mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system".

Mozilla and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) have presented an open letter to Zoom after it said it would require customers to pay for end-to-end encryption. The letter, signed by over 19,000 internet users, says that "best-in-class security should not be something that only the wealthy or businesses can afford." The video conferencing software saw use boom during the coronavirus pandemic, as did other video calling applications such as Microsoft Teams and Houseparty. However, comments from its CEO Eric Yuan that the company would not encrypt conversations for free users so it can work better with law enforcement raised concerns for user security. The company had also shut down the account of a Tiananmen Square activist, who had a paid account, at the behest of the Chinese government.