Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has revealed that he limits his children's exposure to technology. The world's richest person says his kids clamoured for mobile phones as young teenagers, but he and his wife Melinda ignored their complaints until they turned 14. Mr Gates, like many other parents, also imposes rules on gadget use in the house, and is constantly trying to figure out where to draw the line. Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard.

By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you're actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio). Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it'll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,21 and it'll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a "patch" of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:39 A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we've discussed, because it's physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron,22 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together). Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won't destroy the cell--the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique--a punctured neuron won't survive long.

On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry. My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my latest book series on quantitative finance in worldwide distribution. None of it feels like enough though. I feel as though I am wired for a permanent state of flight or fight, waiting for the other shoe to drop, or the metaphorical week when I don't eat. I've chosen not to have children, partly because--despite any success--I still don't feel I have a safety net. I have a huge minimum checking account balance in mind before I would ever consider having children. If you knew me personally, you might get glimpses of stress, self-doubt, anxiety, and depression.

Could adding AI techniques to machine learning help deal with the high volume of data that most security teams have to prioritize? Or is it a step closer to Skynet? Some companies are adding in AI techniques as a way to reduce the noise that traditional security products produce.

At first glance, the letter from the Delhi police commissioner's desk could have easily been dismissed as another routine laundry list of his department's "achievements" in the previous year. A closer look at the letter, written a little over two years ago, would have sprung a pleasant surprise in the context of the city police's technology prowess. The Delhi Police, according to the letter, had partnered with the Indian Space Research Organisation to implement CMAPS--Crime Mapping, Analytics and Predictive System--under the "Effective use of Space Technology-based Tools for Internal Security Scheme" initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. CMAPS generates crime-reporting queries and has the capacity to identify crime hotspots by auto sweep on the Dial 100 database every 1-3 minutes, replacing a Delhi Police crime-mapping tool that involved manual gathering of data every 15 days. It performs trend analysis, compiles crime and criminal profiles and analyses the behaviour of suspected offenders--all with accompanying graphics.

Don't bet on humans finding aliens just walking around on another Earth-like planet -- they'll more likely be swimming. That's the assertion of one scientist, who predicts most of the exoplanets we find in habitable zones around their stars are almost entirely covered in water. Earth itself is about 70 percent water on its surface, but the alien planets are likely "dominated by oceans spanning over 90 percent of their surface area," a study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society speculated. Author Fergus Simpson of the University of Barcelona's Institute of Cosmos Sciences writes that such extensive water coverage would explain why some exoplanets that astronomers have discovered have not been as dense as expected. As experts search for planets that may harbor extraterrestrial life, they are usually looking for planets that are within a certain distance of their host star, called the habitable zone.

Agencies that want to incorporate artificial intelligence into their apps can take advantage of the five different categories of Cognitive Services now available on Microsoft's Azure Government Cloud. With the application programming interfaces and software development kits in Microsoft Cognitive Services, agencies can add emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding to applications. To help agencies serve constituents with hearing disabilities, for example, an API can convert speech to text, help identify speakers and understand the intent in the tone of their voices. Language apps can provide multilingual services that help governments respond interactively to citizen requests, and knowledge and search apps can be used by bots or virtual assistants to access data from the web to answer questions. Chatbots or virtual assistants have piqued the interest of agencies that want to use them to respond to constituent requests 24 hours a day, lessening the burden on call centers that answer many of the same questions.

What are the primary issues that machine learning is trying to solve in attack detection?

Facebook has revealed its secret "Building 8" where it is crafting technology to read people's minds. As well as its brain-computer interface, the company is working on a wide range of secret projects that use technology in ways never before imagined. Those include special ways of making people sense touch and re-wiring people's brains. The company showed off some of the secretive unit's plans during a speech at its F8 conference. Until now, the team's work has been kept entirely quiet – only leaking out in job ads and other publications.

Facebook concluded its two-day F8 annual conference Wednesday where it announced its plan over the next 10 years. The Menlo Park-based company will be investing in a number of foundational technologies including connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality. But what is most interesting is Facebook's investment into building a brain-computer interface that will let users type using their mind. Once developed, brain-computer interfaces could let people control augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with their mind instead of a screen. "We are working on a system that will let people type with their brains. Specifically, we have a goal of creating a silent speech system capable of typing 100 words per minute straight from your brain – that's five times faster than you can type on a smartphone today," Facebook said on its official blog Wednesday.