Now, Nasa has published a stunning image captured by Osiris-Rex during its travels, showing our planet in breathtaking detail. Nasa has published a stunning image captured by Osiris-Rex during its travels, showing our planet in breathtaking detail. MapCam is a medium-resolution camera that will map the asteroid in colour and search for satellites and dust plumes. After a careful survey of Bennu to characterise the asteroid and locate the most promising sample sites, Osiris-Rex will collect between 2 and 70 ounces (about 60 to 2,000 grams) of surface material with its robotic arm and return the sample to Earth via a detachable capsule in 2023.

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity--the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change. When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Mark Harris is a freelance journalist reporting on technology from Seattle. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation. However, documents filed with California show that Levandowski is Way of the Future's CEO and President, and that it aims "through understanding and worship of the Godhead, [to] contribute to the betterment of society." A divine AI may still be far off, but Levandowski has made a start at providing AI with an earthly incarnation. The autonomous cars he was instrumental in developing at Google are already ferrying real passengers around Phoenix, Arizona, while self-driving trucks he built at Otto are now part of Uber's plan to make freight transport safer and more efficient. He even oversaw a passenger-carrying drones project that evolved into Larry Page's Kitty Hawk startup. Levandowski has done perhaps more than anyone else to propel transportation toward its own Singularity, a time when automated cars, trucks and aircraft either free us from the danger and drudgery of human operation--or decimate mass transit, encourage urban sprawl, and enable deadly bugs and hacks. But before any of that can happen, Levandowski must face his own day of reckoning.

In February 2014, Satya Nadella became the third CEO of Microsoft . Nadella, more soft-spoken than his predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, assumed the company's helm amid one of its stormiest chapters. Ballmer, toward the end of his 14-year tenure, had purchased Nokia's mobile phone business at great cost ($7.2 billion) but failed to make a dent in the market dominance of Apple and Samsung . Nadella quickly nixed those ambitions and instead ramped up investment in artificial intelligence and commercial cloud computing. The result has been a remarkable turnaround, featuring major growth in cloud services revenue, a doubling of year-on-year profits and an all-time stock price high. In his new book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (released September 26), Nadella, 50, explains this corporate transformation, lays out his hopeful vision for technological progress and recounts his own rich personal history.

Popular Mechanics reported Tuesday, that the Russian arms manufacturer, Kalashnikov, which made the famed AK-47 rifle is embarking on a new project -- designing hoverbikes. The concept is similar to many existing hovercraft and flying car concepts -- it is battery operated and stays in the air using 16 sets of rotors. The vehicle, which hasn't been named yet, was showcased at Russian defense giant Rostec's headquarters on Tuesday. While the company has ventured into aviation with this latest effort, it will continue to make weapons and artillery, including the AK-47. The company has been recently diversifying and is actually combining its weapons capabilities with self-navigating vehicles. Earlier this month, the company showcased its BAS-01 BM "Soratnik" self-driven vehicle with a gun turret, which can be autonomously fired.

In an ideal world, scientists would have access to the entire body of published scientific knowledge. They would be able to search this resource to rapidly locate and extract specific data in a way that is accurate, is repeatable, and leads to the discovery of new and related information. We're not there yet, but technology and information science have made great strides in this direction. Scientific publications contain measurements, descriptions, and images that have utility beyond the aims of the original work, particularly when they are aggregated into databases. For example, the Paleobiology Database contains field- and museum-based descriptions of more than 1.3 million fossil occurrences compiled from some 50,000 references, and sample-based geochemical data from the published literature are available in EarthChem.

Written by Laura Mather, Founder and CEO at Unitive, Inc. (Talent Sonar). Every hiring team is asking the same question: is this candidate the right person for the job? This should be a fairly simple question to answer, but after the resume review and the interview are over, it's become pretty clear that humans don't always have the best intuition. Although we sometimes do get it right, sometimes just isn't enough. Bad hires are hugely expensive for any organization of any size. Tony Hsieh, the CEO Zappos has estimated that bad hires cost the company "well over $1 million."

Jeremy Corbyn will today hint at fresh taxes on firms that replace people with robots as he calls for a'new settlement between work and leisure'. The Labour leader will use his set piece party conference speech to say that, with automation due to destroy millions of jobs in the coming decades, the state needs to intervene to ensure the benefits are shared across society. 'We need urgently to face the challenge of automation; robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant,' he will say. 'That is a threat in the hands of the greedy but what an opportunity if it's managed in the interests of society as a whole. 'If planned and managed properly, accelerated technological change can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure, a springboard for creativity and culture, making technology our servant and not our master at long last.' Labour has previously toyed with the idea of a'universal basic income', which would effectively see everyone put on benefits.

Hoaxes and trickery are almost as old as human history. When the Roman Republic first conquered the Italian peninsula between 500-200 BC, it was known to send fake refugees into enemy cities to "[subvert] the enemy from within." "Pope Joan" was believed to be a woman who allegedly tricked her way into become pope in the Middle Ages by pretending to be a man -- but the entire story is now viewed as fake, a fictional yarn spun centuries after her purported reign. "Vortigern and Rowena," a play that debuted in 1798, was initially touted as a lost work of William Shakespeare -- but was in fact a forgery created by William Henry Ireland. And in the 1980s, the Soviet Union attempted to damage the United States' reputation and sow discord among its allies by spreading the myth that American scientists had created AIDS in a military laboratory, in an "active measures" disinformation campaign called "Operation INFEKTION."

It's been a banner year for cyber criminals. International cybersecurity disasters such as the WannaCry and Goldeneye ransomware attacks impacted thousands of people around the globe and illustrated just how tenuous a grasp most organizations hold on their security. Then there's the Equifax debacle, which impacted about 1 in 3 Americans. And if the CIA can't protect its own data from ending up on Wikileaks, what chance do the rest of us stand against ever-more-sophisticated hackers? In theory, artificial intelligence can provide new forms of protection against nefarious actors.

Multi-task/Multi-output learning seeks to exploit correlation among tasks to enhance performance over learning or solving each task independently. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the context of Gaussian Processes (GPs) and propose a new model which learns a mixture of latent processes by decomposing the covariance matrix into a sum of structured hidden components each of which is controlled by a latent GP over input features and a "weight" over tasks. From this sum structure, we propose a parallelizable parameter learning algorithm with a predetermined initialization for the "weights". We also notice that an ensemble parameter learning approach using mini-batches of training data not only reduces the computation complexity of learning but also improves the regression performance. We evaluate our model on two datasets, the smaller Swiss Jura dataset and another relatively larger ATMS dataset from NOAA. Substantial improvements are observed compared with established alternatives.