Forty-five years have passed since humans last set foot on an extraterrestrial body. Now, the moon is back at the center of efforts not only to explore space, but to create a permanent, independent space-faring society. Planning expeditions to Earth's nearest celestial neighbor is no longer just a NASA effort, though the U.S. space agency has plans for a moon-orbiting space station that would serve as a staging ground for Mars missions in the early 2030s. The United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is planning a lunar fueling station for spacecraft, capable of supporting 1,000 people living in space within 30 years. Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Robert Bigelow all have companies aiming to deliver people or goods to the moon.

Beyond membership in the Pantheon of Famous Brits, Winston Churchill and George Orwell would seem to have little in the way of common ground. Orwell was a journalist and novelist. Churchill had money and pedigree; the young Orwell lived on the street and raised his own vegetables during World War II. Churchill's political leanings were conservative; Orwell flirted with communism until he witnessed the betrayal of his Republican comrades by Soviet agents in the Spanish Civil War. In "Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom," Thomas E. Ricks gets beyond these differences and finds the iron core of both men.

There will be many people who will say it does exist and has working technologies, hardware and software. It is an interesting error in thinking to focus on closed system devices/products as to what Ubiquity (IoT3) is. Devices are used to get across the point of various types of connections and networks being accessed. But more importantly in a full implementation of the concept of Ubiquity (often described as the IoT) devices may not even be owned anymore. The ownership of devices ceases to be important if you can own your digital identity, can verify it and establish your own ecosystem of assets in Blockchain.

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 two 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. As part of DARPA's ALIAS program, this robot arm was able to help land a Boeing 737 in a simulator: The only reason this works at all is because of how heavily automated the aircraft already is. It makes me wonder what the point of the robot arm is at all: Why not just build this stuff into the existing autopilot already, you know?

Machines are eating humans' jobs talents. And it's not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents. Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms. People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, ...

Leading funders and researchers this week agreed that all their clinical trials for vaccines and devices would in future be publicly registered and the results published. The pledge -- made by nearly a dozen groups including the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council -- is a boost for innovation and safety. Some estimates suggest that half of all trial findings, notably those that do not yield positive results, are not made public. This is a significant waste of research, burying information that could help to better direct future work, reduce dangers to patients and boost efficiency. In an era of big data and partnership between medical research and IT, there is considerable potential to improve number crunching and identify patterns in trial data.

A collaboration between an 11-year-old East Northport boy and his IBM inventor father has given voice to cybersecurity tools using that company's Watson artificial intelligence system. In November, Mike Spisak, whose title is chief transformation architect and master inventor, IBM Security, was joined by his son, Evan, as he worked in his basement "laboratory." Spisak was seeking to apply artificial intelligence tools to the problem of cybersecurity. He was typing to a "chatbot" -- a computer program that simulates human conversation -- in the hope that it could develop into a tool that could provide cybersecurity answers to IBM's corporate clients. That's when Evan, inspired by J.A.R.V.I.S., the AI assistant of comic book and movie hero Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, piped up: "Dad, why can't you talk to it with your voice?"

Mobile phone customers could soon be able to dump their network provider by text. Ofcom says people shouldn't need to make a potentially long and uncomfortable phone call to their operator in order to switch networks, as they currently have to. Research conducted by the regulator also shows that these calls can often be disrupted, causing further stress. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

A security researcher claims to have created a new tool capable of restoring computers infected by WannaCry ransomware. Adrien Guinet has released WannaKey, which is designed to take advantage of a shortcoming in Windows XP to decrypt an infected machine's files. He says he's used it successfully on several infected Windows XP computers, but the method won't work for all victims. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Except for those folks living under rocks (sounds uncomfortable), everyone knows about or at least has heard of bitcoin. However, not everyone understands the technology of bitcoin, which extends well beyond Internet-based currency. For the rock people, bitcoin is an Internet-based currency that allows for transparency with respect to each transfer of the currency through the use of a distributed database. Each transaction is locked in a block, and blocks are connected to form a "blockchain." Blockchain is an open source technology that facilitates creating each block, locking each block, and connecting the resulting string of blocks.