We arrive a few minutes late, thanks to a traffic jam that is now routine on the Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru. In the lobby of a hotel in Cessna Business Park, which houses Cisco, Flipkart and InMobi, D J Patil settles into a chat with my colleague Sriram Sharma. Patil comes across as an easygoing guy for a scientist. He was the first chief data scientist at the White House, handpicked by then US president Barack Obama. Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher coined the term "data scientist" in 2008.

A resident of the Silver Wing Social Care elderly care home in Tokyo's Chuo Ward chats happily to a staff member in the facility's communal area, while in a nearby room another senior is being helped by a rehabilitation specialist to walk again after a fall last month. These workers never take a day off, never complain and don't need to be paid, for they are robots. Silver Wing Social Care provides a glimpse into the future of Japan and indeed other industrialised nations as they follow its path to ageing societies and labour shortages. The company's flagship care facility began using robots to help care for residents four years ago after being selected by the city government as a test project. Japan is entering uncharted territory for a modern economy. A consistently low birth rate has shrunk the working-age population by around 10 million since its mid-1990s peak, with another 20 million set to disappear from workplaces in the coming decades.

Data released by West Midlands Fire Service appears to show the city of Birmingham has too many fire stations, with 15 compared with neighbouring Solihull's two. The service's online map of attendance times shows many parts of Solihull, a suburban and rural area, have to wait much longer for firefighters to arrive. Even on the basis of relative population sizes, Solihull looks under-served. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.

An alleged ISIS plot involving a drone attack on Turkey's Incirlik air base -- which is used by the U.S. Air Force -- was foiled Thursday when Turkish authorities arrested a Russian national suspected of being an Islamist militant. Renad Bakiev, who previously traveled to Syria, was detained in the southern city of Adana for planning the drone attack, police said in a statement. Officials said he admitted to surveying the Incirlik air base to plan out his strike, and attempted to attack Americans -- but he was unsuccessful. Adana police said Bakiev had ties to ISIS and also intended to assault the local Alevi community -- a religious minority ISIS regards as heretics. The religious group is also the largest one in Turkey and is an offshoot of Shia Islam.

U.S. Postal Service (USPS) crates sit on the floor at the Brookland Post Office in Washington, D.C., U.S. No customer data was stolen in a recent data breach, USPS officials say. WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Postal Service is warning that it will likely default on up to $6.9 billion in payments for future retiree health benefits for the fifth straight year. It is citing a coming cash crunch that could disrupt day-to-day mail delivery. The post office says it expects cash balances to run low by October. Postmaster General Megan Brennan stressed an urgent need for federal regulators to grant the Postal Service wide freedom to increase stamp prices to cover costs.

Arizona is welcoming a new wave of settlers. Techies, mostly from California--Silicon Valley, to be precise--coming to the desert to fulfill their quest to flood the roads with self-driving cars. Mobileye is the latest arrival. The firm announced Wednesday that it will build a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles, and test the first of them on the public roads of the Copper State. The Israeli firm that Intel recently bought for $15 billion joins Uber and Google spinoff Waymo, both of which have put more than 100 robocars on the roads of Tempe and Phoenix, respectively.

Tesla is working on electric, self-driving trucks that can travel in "platoons" or road trains capable of following a lead vehicle, according to leaked correspondence with regulators. The electric truck, which is due to be unveiled in September by Elon Musk's electric vehicle company, is close to prototype on-road testing, with both Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and California officials in talks to permit trials on public roads, according to documents seen by Reuters. In an email to the Nevada DMV, Tesla sought permission to "operate our prototype test trucks in a continuous manner across the state line and within the states of Nevada and California in a platooning and/or autonomous mode without having a person in the vehicle", which would be one of the first tests not including a human driver in the vehicle if permitted. The correspondence and meetings with state officials show that Tesla moving forward in a highly competitive area of commercial transport also being pursued by Uber and Alphabet's former Google car company, now called Waymo. While Musk has previously stated aims to build an electric truck, Tesla has yet to announce any autonomous driving aims for the vehicles, which are seen as the next evolution of greener and safer road freight.

Today we're looking at edible robot surgeons, EVs that will go (some) distance, and free apples. Here's how Tesla's long-range Model 3 covers 310 miles A bunch of EPA certification documents have finally revealed that the long-range version of Tesla's Model 3 is equipped with a 350-volt, 230-amp-hour battery pack. Of course, that's the $44,000 version, so anyone sticking with the $35k base model will have a battery pack rated for 220 miles on a charge. 'Innerspace' was actually a documentary. In the near future, robots will no longer be cutting into us -- from the outside, at least.

When Jason Matheny joined the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a program manager in 2009, he made a habit of chatting to the organization's research analysts. "What do you need?" he would ask, and the answer was always the same: a way to make more accurate predictions. "What if we made you an artificially intelligent computer model that forecasts real-world events such as political instability, weapons tests and disease outbreaks?" The analysts' response was enthusiastic, except for one crucial caveat. "It came down to whether they could explain the model to a decision maker--like the secretary of Defense," says Matheny, who is now IARPA's director.

That's how the duo are billed when they appear in 1960s adverts to promote a now defunct UK computer company. Using young, attractive women to advertise computers was a common ploy in Britain at the time, when male managers, uninitiated in the complexities of this new technology, viewed the machines as intimidating and opaque. "Computers were expensive and using women to advertise them gave the appearance to managers that jobs involving computers are easy and can be done with a cheap labour force," explains technology historian Marie Hicks. They might have been on a typist's salary, but women like Sadie were not typists – they were skilled computer programmers, minus the prestige or pay the modern equivalent might command. As Hicks' book Programmed Inequality illustrates, women were the largest trained technical workforce of the computing industry during the second world war and through to the mid-sixties.