A robot armed with a hammer and quake monitor is rocketing towards Mars -- aiming to reveal its internal secrets and discover whether it was ever home to life. In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida's Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja. The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles (485 million kilometers) to get there. NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida's Cape Canaveral InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before - nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters - to take the planet's temperature The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the U.S., France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before - nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters - to take the planet's temperature.

Billions are being invested in AI startups across every imaginable industry and business function. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are in a heavyweight fight investing over $20 billion in AI in 2016. Corporates are scrambling to ensure they realise the productivity benefits of AI ahead of their competitors while looking over their shoulders at the startups. China is putting its considerable weight behind AI and the European Union is talking about a $22 billion AI investment as it fears losing ground to China and the US. From the 3.5 billion daily searches on Google to the new Apple iPhone X that uses facial recognition to Amazon Alexa that cutely answers our questions.

It's found just the right place in Arizona, which has continued its lax regulatory policy for autonomous vehicles after an Uber self-driving Volvo killed a pedestrian on March 18 in Tempe. Nuro's co-founder and president, David Ferguson, signed a registration letter to the state Department of Transportation for the company on April 17, confirming that it planned to start testing fully autonomous vehicles on Arizona roads. On March 1, Governor Doug Ducey published an executive order to address fully autonomous vehicles, adding a modicum of oversight to his pro-business policy. All companies that intend to put fully driverless vehicles on Arizona roads in the near future, or are already testing them on roads, were ordered to register with the state within 60 days. As of May 2, Nuro was one of only two companies that had filed the required statement.

Facebook may have succeeded in getting Cambridge Analytica to delete millions of users' data in January 2016, but the information based on that data appears to have survived for much longer. The Guardian has obtained leaked emails suggesting that Cambridge Analytica avoided explicitly agreeing to delete the derivatives of that data, such as predictive personality models. Former employees claimed the company kept that data modelling in a "hidden corner" of a server until an audit in March 2017 (prompted by an Observer journalist's investigation), and it only certified that it had scrubbed the data models in April 2017 -- half a year after the US presidential election. In a response to the Guardian, a Cambridge Analytica spokesperson denied that there was a "secret cache," and said that it had started looking for and deleting derivatives of that data after the initial wipe, finishing in April 2017. It was a "lengthy process," the company claimed.

It's not easy to promote closer US-China ties these days. The countries are moving toward a trade war; a US delegation left Beijing Friday reporting little progress on resolving disputes. US executives accuse China of stealing their intellectual property. The US government is imposing ever tighter restrictions on Chinese telecommunications firms. That made an uncomfortable backdrop for the annual conference of the Committee of 100, a group of influential Chinese-Americans, in Silicon Valley over the weekend.

But Ford Motor Co. F 1.43%, BMW AG BMW -0.65% and other auto makers are pressing the Trump administration to allow them to leapfrog that system by fast-tracking fifth-generation cellular broadband in automobiles. Known as 5G, it transmits data at up to 10 times the speed of current broadband and improves reliability by potentially shrinking a self-driving car's ability to stop to one inch, from one yard with today's network. The showdown between the Wi-Fi-based and cellular-based standards for connected cars echoes winner-take-all format wars in other industries, and is a sign of how software is emerging as a new battleground for auto makers. The stakes are high as U.S. motor-vehicle deaths have risen in recent years. Car makers say vehicle-to-vehicle communication will ease congestion and improve safety.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as both a boon and a threat. It uses our personal data to influence our lives without us realising it. It is used by social media to draw our attention to things we are interested in buying, and by our tablets and computers to predict what we want to type (good). It facilitates targeting of voters to influence elections (bad, particularly if your side loses). Perhaps the truth or otherwise of allegations such as electoral interference should be regarded in the light of the interests of their promoters.

The whole "fear of SkyNet" trope is a bit moot at this point, seeing as how robots have already infiltrated our roads, skies and cafeteria-style eateries. You can already see it happening with Lyft adding 30 self-driving vehicles to its Las Vegas fleet, Sphero debuting yet another domestic robopanion, and gangs leveraging drone swarms to blindside the FBI. Numbers, because how else are we going to learn to speak the binary language of our future overlords? Typically leveraged for counter-surveillance these remote controlled quadcopters are now taking a more active role in illegal activities -- specifically, buzzing FBI agents while they attempt a hostage rescue. Turns out, they worked so well that the company is expanding the pilot program to more than two dozen autonomous vehicles.

Facebook's failure to compel Cambridge Analytica to delete all traces of data from its servers – including any "derivatives" – enabled the company to retain predictive models derived from millions of social media profiles throughout the US presidential election, the Guardian can reveal. Leaked emails reveal that when Cambridge Analytica told Facebook almost a year before the election that it had deleted data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users, it stopped short of agreeing to also erase derivatives of the data. The correspondence, obtained by the Guardian, also raises questions about the accuracy of the testimony that Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to the US Congress last month. Derivatives of data, which can include predictive models, or clusters of populations in psychological groupings, can be highly valuable to companies involved in micro-targeting advertisements to voters. Data scientists say such models and analysis are often more valuable than underlying raw data.