It is a unique view of our planet from a spacecraft speeding to a rendezvous with an asteroid. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft took this incredible image of home from 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) from Earth, about 13 times the distance between the Earth and Moon. Asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich hunk of rock that might contain organic materials or molecular precursors to life. Three images (different color wavelengths) were combined and color-corrected to make the composite, and the Moon was'stretched' (brightened) to make it more easily visible. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer--is to map and return samples. It is also an asteroid that could someday make a close pass or even a collision with Earth, though not for several centuries.

Loup Venture co-founder Gene Munster made the claim in a report highlighting eight predictions for the technology industry in 2018. 'Target is the ideal offline partner for Amazon for two reasons, shared demographic and manageable but comprehensive store count,' Munster wrote. Loup Venture co-founder Gene Munster made the claim in a report highlighting eight predictions for the technology industry in 2018. The analyst, best known for his incorrect prediction Apple would make its own TV set, claims the timing of the deal is hard to know. 'Getting the timing on this is difficult, but seeing the value of the combination is easy.' 'Amazon believe's the future of retail is a mix of mostly online and some offline,' Munster wrote.

The Chinese armies are now able to use robots to fire ballistic missiles after successfully developing an automated launching system, Chinese military media claimed. The advanced system would help China fire warheads three times faster and halve the number of soldiers involved. The news emerged as tensions between Beijing and Washington have escalated over the claims that China had allowed oil into North Korea, which violated a United Nations embargo. Beijing has denied the allegations. Beijing's next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile, Dongfeng-41 (pictured) could allegedly strike anywhere in the world.

The International Space Station sits at an altitude of approximately 220 miles above the Earth in this photo taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking. Inside NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is a test environment that simulates the International Space Station's pressurized capsules. Here, aerospace engineers test the new Astrobee intra vehicular activity (IVA) robots, which will be heading to the ISS in the spring. These robots are 1-by-1-foot cubes, with an array of LED communication lights. They can function autonomously or be remotely controlled from Houston.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere these days, from self-driving cars and voice-activated software like Siri and Alexa. It's being used in fields from criminal justice to finance. So this year in All Tech Considered, we're going to spend some time exploring AI. Its leadership wants to dominate the tech world. It's one way China can beat possible competitors and adversaries.

The Canadian government will soon hire an Ottawa-based company specializing in social media monitoring and artificial intelligence to forecast spikes in suicide rates. A contract with Advanced Symbolics Inc., an AI and market research firm, is set to be finalized next month. Working with the company to develop its strategy, the federal government will define "suicide-related behaviour" on social media and "use that classifier to conduct market research on the general population of Canada," according to a document published to Public Works website. This pilot project will last three months, after which the government "will determine if future work would be useful for ongoing suicide surveillance," the tender document said. Instead of calling people to assess public opinion, Advanced Symbolics conducts its market research by identifying and tracking social media accounts to build a representative sample of a population.

Investment in Big Data and AI shows no signs of slowing down. Machine Learning capabilities Machine Learning capabilities are growing rapidly, transforming business applications in all sorts of industries from medicine and healthcare, to self-driving cars, gaming, and fraud detection to name a few. We're expecting Machine Learning processing to become even faster and smarter in 2018 where we can see it being applied to even more of a variety of sectors and business problems. This year, we've seen AI integrate itself into many aspects of our lives and countless projects for social good. Get ready for greater integration into our daily lives and more advancements in the AI revolution.

CENTRAL bankers around the world have set up or are creating departments to embrace Big Data in the quest for deeper insight into the economies they manage. David Hardoon, chief data officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, in a recent speech said: "Isaac Asimov once said, 'I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.'" "We are now starting to put in place the necessary tools, infrastructure and skillsets to harness the power of data science to unlock insights, sharpen surveillance of risks, enhance regulatory compliance and transform the way we do work." Authorities like Mr Hardoon are tapping publicly available sources such as Google Trends and jobs websites to help "nowcast" their economies, and confidential data like credit registers that can help identify a stressed bank.

Google is training AI to identify human behavior, using clips from movies. Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn't likely to bring any quick resolutions. In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI's potential impact on society was encapsulated by the opinions of two bold-face Silicon Valley names. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Association this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk -- which would include cosmologist Stephen Hawking's view that AI could prove "the worst event in the history of civilization" -- with a video post calling such negative talk "pretty irresponsible."

The United States Navy is reportedly expanding their ocean combat network, known as the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES), to seamlessly connect their ships, submarines, and on-shore locations using artificial intelligence (AI). The hope is that CANES will reduce the number of sailors required to maintain operations, thus potentially saving the Navy billions of dollars over years of use. By 2020, the Navy hopes to deploy CANES on 190 vessels and Maritime Operations Centers. "We are very interested in artificial intelligence being able to help us better than it is today," Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, Navy Cyber Security Division Director, told Warrior. "We want to trust a machine and also look at AI in terms of how we use it against adversaries."