NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took photos from the Vera Rubin Ridge showing the interior and rim of Gale Crater. The full image features 16 photos stitched together. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took photos from the Vera Rubin Ridge showing the interior and rim of Gale Crater. The full image features 16 photos stitched together. Here's a reminder that while you are out in the world buying groceries, picking up dry cleaning or catching up on The Crown, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is on the red planet doing work.

Johnny Matheny is the first person to live with an advanced mind-controlled robotic arm. Last December, researchers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab delivered the arm to Matheny at his home in Port Richey, Florida. Aside from the occasional demo, this is the first time the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) has spent significant time out of the lab. Johns Hopkins has received more than $120 million from the US Defense Department to help pay for the arm's development over the past 10 years. Matheny, who lost his arm to cancer in 2005, is the first person to live with the MPL, but there are plans to have others try it out this year.

Twenty-five different startups were funded in January cumulatively raising $784 million; a great start for the new year. Four acquisitions were reported during the month while the IPO front lay waiting for something to happen. According to Silicon Valley Bank's annual survey of 1,000 executives, startup founders are confident 2018 will be a good year for funding and for business conditions – except hiring and retaining foreign talent. More than half of startups surveyed (51%) reported that at least one of their founders is an immigrant. One-third of startups said laws and regulations prompted them to locate facilities (or move non-sales operations) offshore.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. That was pretty good but doesn't quite stack up against this old ABB pancake robot video, which will always be my favorite: The title of this video is "Laser Dune Buggy vs. Drone." Slightly underwhelming, maybe, but it does have an effective range of a mile, which is impressive.

Artificial intelligence is better than us at analyzing data. We're all familiar with IBM Watson, the AI which won a round of Jeopardy and is now free for anyone to use to crunch data. But you may not know that the 160 man hours it would take a human to analyze genomic data from both tumor cells and healthy cells takes Watson 10 minutes to process. Just as robotics and automation has found a natural home in manufacturing, doctors and researchers are finding artificial intelligence has hundreds of applications in their industry. From telling the difference between cancerous and non-cancerous cells to diagnosing rare genetic conditions using facial recognition algorithms and refining everything from hearing aids to artificial hands, artificial intelligence healthcare is finding its footing. There are a lot of barriers for full integration of the technology.

In this paper, we focus on learning structure-aware document representations from data without recourse to a discourse parser or additional annotations. Drawing inspiration from recent efforts to empower neural networks with a structural bias (Cheng et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2017), we propose a model that can encode a document while automatically inducing rich structural dependencies. Specifically, we embed a differentiable non-projective parsing algorithm into a neural model and use attention mechanisms to incorporate the structural biases. Experimental evaluations across different tasks and datasets show that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on document modeling tasks while inducing intermediate structures which are both interpretable and meaningful.

On Jan. 23, two U.S. astronauts went out to give a new hand to the station's big robotic arm. NASA had planned another spacewalk this week, but bumped it to mid-February because engineers needed extra time to get the mechanical hand working.

Artificial intelligence has increasingly been integrated into the weapons systems of the world's leading militaries, and at least one expert has said the futuristic technology may soon be the subject of a new Cold War. In a piece published Tuesday by The Conversation, North Dakota State University assistant professor Jeremy Straub argued that unlike the nuclear weapons that dominated much of the 21st century arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the use of cyberweapons and artificial intelligence largely remained "fair game," even as tensions again flared between the rivals. Both countries have invested heavily in developing new tools to wage war on this new front, but Russia particularly has sought to use it as an opportunity to upstage the more conventionally powerful U.S. Related: U.S. is losing to Russia and China in war for artificial intelligence, report says "Now, more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia have decommissioned tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Any modern-day cold war would include cyberattacks and nuclear powers' involvement in allies' conflicts," wrote Straub, who was also associate director of the university's Institute for Cyber Security Education and Research, in his article. "It's already happening," he added.

Google's parent company Alphabet has reported lower than expected profits in the last three months of 2017 after higher costs offset an increase in advertising sales. Revenue for the three months ending December 31 was $32.3 billion (£22.6bn), a rise of 24% on the same period in 2016. Overall, Alphabet reported a loss of $3 billion (£2.1bn) for the fourth quarter as it set aside $11 billion for taxes - an estimated $9.9 billion (£6.9bn) was for taxes on repatriated earnings. Excluding the tax provision, Alphabet would have posted a profit of $6.8 billion (£4.7bn), falling short of the $7 billion analysts had predicted. The tech giant's shares slid 2.3 per cent in after-hours trade on the results, highlighting concerns about the rising costs of projects such as the Waymo's self-driving car service, and the fact that profits were weaker than expected. The company also used its earning report to confirm that current board member John Hennessy has been named Alphabet chairman following the departure of Eric Schmidt in December.

An ex-YouTube insider reveals how its recommendation algorithm promotes divisive clips and conspiracy videos. Did they harm Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency? Fri 2 Feb 2018 07.00 EST Last modified on Fri 2 Feb 2018 08.54 EST It was one of January's most viral videos. The 22-year-old, who is in a Japanese forest famous as a suicide spot, is visibly shocked, then amused. "Dude, his hands are purple," he says, before turning to his friends and giggling. "You never stand next to a dead guy?" Paul, who has 16 million mostly teen subscribers to his YouTube channel, removed the video from YouTube 24 hours later amid a furious backlash. It was still long enough for the footage to receive 6m views and a spot on YouTube's coveted list of trending videos. The next day, I watched a copy of the video on YouTube. Then I clicked on the "Up next" thumbnails of recommended videos that YouTube showcases on the right-hand side of the video player. This conveyor belt of clips, which auto-play by default, are designed to seduce us spending more time on Google's video broadcasting platform. I was curious where they might lead.