Researchers have discovered another clear indicator that life once existed on Mars. NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of boron on the red planet's surface. It is a key ingredient for life, and scientists say the find is a huge boost in the hunt for life. RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a nucleic acid present in all modern life, but scientists have long hypothesized an'RNA World,' where the first proto-life was made of individual RNA strands that both contained genetic information and could copy itself. A key ingredient of RNA is a sugar called ribose.

Without a doubt, 2016 was the year'disruption' became tangible. Events like Brexit, the U.S. election and India's demonetization exercise brought home the reality we are living in a fast-changing global society where a sense of anti-establishment and rebellion is accelerating change. This shows no sign of stopping in 2017, with new technologies allowing banks to offer service levels more synonymous with hospitality than financial services, and with established technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation seeing a resurgence in combination with new voice commerce models, IoT data, and robo advisors to offer more personal, more contextual and ultimately unique banking experiences for each and every one of us. In meeting with decision-making executives from the U.S to Europe, the Middle East, India and Singapore, I have compiled a clear list of trends that are dominating technology investment discussions across the globe's leading banks. In 2016 we already saw several leaders' like DBS, Santander, Wells Fargo and Bank of America roll out their chatbots, but 2017 is the year when the rebirth of this very old technology will come into its own.

Twelve years ago, I met four impoverished teenagers at a high school in Arizona. They were born in Mexico, brought to the United States as children, and attended school in Phoenix. Without residency papers, their future job prospects were severely limited, but they nonetheless decided to enter an underwater robotics contest sponsored by NASA and the US Navy. They went up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT. They built their robot out of junk and cheap plastic pipe, named their creation Stinky, and went on to win the championship.

French President Emmanuel Macron has made fighting Islamist militants his primary foreign policy objective and the move to armed drones fits into a more aggressive policy at a time when it looks increasingly unlikely Paris will be able to withdraw from the region in the medium to long-term.

Renowned for his concerns over artificial intelligence and its potential negative impact on humanity, tech titan Elon Musk has made his most concerning comments yet surrounding AI. It could be the cause of World War 3. In a series of tweets on Monday, the Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and OpenAI co-founder wrote that artificial intelligence could be the eventual cause of the next world war. May be initiated not by the country leaders, but one of the AI's, if it decides that a prepemptive strike is most probable path to victory Should be low on our list of concerns for civilizational existential risk. NK has no entangling alliances that wd polarize world into war.

In Plato's "Phaedrus," Socrates tells the legend of King Thamus who is given the gift of writing from Theuth, the Egyptian god of knowledge. Writing, Theuth persuades, will act as a mass remedy for memory loss, allowing information to be more easily remembered and stored. No longer will people have to rely on oral tradition to learn and pass on information. King Thamus is unconvinced and argues writing will in fact have the opposite effect, that writing will lead to laziness, not enlightenment. Instead of internalizing information, younger generations would rely on notes, books, reminders and otherwise externalized forms of knowledge to formulate the illusion of knowledge.

A new research center is to be established in India to undertake foundational research in many areas of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) applicable in the Indian context, and create societal impact through multidisciplinary interactions with government, academic, research and industrial collaborators. The center, a collaboration between Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), will receive around US$0.5m per year funding for five years to carry out research in areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, network analytics, interpretable machine learning, and domain aware AI. Its activity will include research projects, knowledge management and dissemination, developing prototypes, outreach projects, and setting up collaborative facilities and laboratories among others. The center's mandate requires interaction with industry and other universities, including international student and faculty exchanges. The objective is to advance scientific innovation for societal benefit.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, appears during the International Space Station Research and Development Conference on July 19, 2017. A race toward "superiority" between countries over artificial intelligence will be the most likely cause of World War III, warns entrepreneur Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has been outspoken about his fears of AI, urging countries to consider regulations now before the technology becomes more widely used. The comments were sparked by comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said the country leading the way in AI "will become ruler of the world," reports news site RT. "It begins," said Musk in an earlier tweet ahead of his warning about the potential risks.

On the assembly line in Toyota's low-strung, sprawling Georgetown, Kentucky factory, worker ingenuity pops up in the least expected places. For instance, normally in auto plants installing a gas tank is a tedious, relatively complicated procedure. Because the tank is so heavy, a crane usually positions and holds it against the skeletal frame while employees tighten its straps and bolts from under the chassis, a strained and time-consuming maneuver that requires keeping arms up in the air for long periods of time. To allay the obvious shortcomings in this process, a group of Toyota workers designed an ingenuous device–a multi-armed piece of industrial machinery that in a single action lifts the tank in the air, places it in its crevice and reaches underneath the vehicle's skeletal body to permanently attach the tank to the chassis. The process is fast, seamless, and ergonomically safe.

Tech companies are asking to step into doctors' offices with us, and eavesdrop on all the symptoms and concerns we share with our GPs. While doctors and other medical staff are bound by confidentiality and ethics, we haven't yet figured out what it means when a digital third party -- the apps and algorithms -- are allowed in the room, too. Healthcare isn't the place to mimic Facebook's former motto to "move fast and break things", or push regulations to see where they bend, a la Uber. Instead, patients need to trust who's in the consultation room with them, says Nathan Lea, senior research associate at UCL's Institute of Health Informatics and the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research. "You want the individual to be able to share with the doctor or clinical team as much detail as necessary without the anxiety that someone else will be looking at it," he says.