At the International Astronautical Congress last September, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk convinced many die-hard space engineers he could get a fleet of private rockets filled with thousands of people to Mars. Musk's speech was long on orbits, flight plans, and fuel costs. But it was short on how any of those colonists would survive. In fact, the Mars journey would likely be a dead end. Bathed in radiation and with nothing growing on it, the Red Planet is basically a graveyard.

In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can acquire cultural biases embedded in the patterns of wording, the researchers found. These biases range from the morally neutral, like a preference for flowers over insects, to the objectionable views of race and gender. Identifying and addressing possible bias in machine learning will be critically important as we increasingly turn to computers for processing the natural language humans use to communicate, for instance in doing online text searches, image categorization and automated translations.

Let's admit that this looked like a bad election for video games at the outset, once it came down to Trump versus Clinton. As a senator in 2005, Clinton coauthored federal legislation to criminalize the sale of violent video games to minors. In a press conference that year she even claimed that the effects of violent games on kids' behavior was as bad as the result of lead poisoning on IQ, a claim that is…well…nuts. The worst video game news on the Trump front comes from one of Trump's tweets from 2012 following the awful Sandy Hook shooting in which a 20-year-old male killed numerous children and elementary school personnel as well as his mother and himself. Soon after, Trump tweeted "Video game violence & glorification must be stopped – it is creating monsters!" But in all fairness Trump was hardly the only person to blame video games.

The Labor MP Jim Chalmers was at a town hall meeting in Eagleby, Queensland this week when an older couple approached him. They were part of a crowd that turned up to see Bill Shorten's "Bill Bus", Labor's resurrected campaign bus from last year's election, on its way from Queensland to New South Wales as part of a two-week tour. Eagleby had been devastated by recent flooding, a painful hit for a suburb that only five years ago had twice the rate of unemployment than the state average. Chalmers said the couple wanted to talk about "the kids" – not their own necessarily, just young people. In a suburb where, according to the 2011 census, close to 50% of the workforce comprised labourers, tradesmen, technicians, machinery operators and drivers, where were the jobs going to come from when everything was getting automated?

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but rods and cables may one day help NASA explore planets. For a few years now, scientists at NASA's Ames research center and students from the University of California Berkeley's Best Lab have teamed up to create so-called tentricity robots, which they hope to one day use for planetary exploration. These structures rely on a constant interaction between compression and tension. Because the robots have no rigid connections, their shapes can be deformed using a series of small motors. The motors pull on the cables and make the bots move by either rolling or hopping.

In late February, the UN-Secretary General held a press conference, highlighting the risk of starvation in East Africa and the necessity to raise funds to address the emergency situations in Somalia and South Sudan. Drought has been back in these countries and their neighbours since 2016, leading to a huge current food crisis. While governments are trying to handle the situation, how could technology innovations help prevent starvation and improve agriculture management in the future? We met with Laurent Rivière, a French 30 years-old entrepreneur, who shared with us his view on the subject with a combination of engineer pragmatism and changemaker idealism . Founder and CEO at Sunbirds for two years, he explained to us how his "bird of the sun," his solar drone, is addressing the agriculture challenges of the 21st century.

A state economic development board on Thursday approved an $8 million tax credit for General Motors as the company looks to expand its autonomous vehicle division with more than 1,100 hires in California. The GM tax credit was among more than $91 million in California Competes incentives for 114 companies approved at a board meeting in Sacramento of Gov. Jerry Brown's GO-Biz agency. The credits range from GM's $8 million to $20,000 for MinowCPA Corp., an accounting firm that plans to hire eight people in Newport Beach and Santa Ana. GM promises to hire 1,163 workers at an average salary of $116,000. San Francisco is the hub for GM's autonomous vehicle research and development since the company acquired Cruise Automation last year, said Kevin Kelly, a GM spokesman.

When science fiction author Isaac Asimov devised his Three Laws of Robotics he was thinking about androids. He envisioned a world where these human-like robots would act like servants and would need a set of programming rules to prevent them from causing harm. But in the 75 years since the publication of the first story to feature his ethical guidelines, there have been significant technological advancements. We now have a very different conception of what robots can look like and how we will interact with them. The highly-evolved field of robotics is producing a huge range of devices, from autonomous vacuum cleaners to military drones to entire factory production lines.

Russia's space-bound humanoid robot FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) is being trained to shoot guns from both of its hands. The activity will help improve the android's motor skills and decision-making, according to its creators, who have also tried to address concerns that they're developing a real-life Terminator. "Robot platform F.E.D.O.R. showed shooting skills with two hands," wrote Russia's deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, on Twitter. 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.

Tory voters' hard line on immigration gives Theresa May a Brexit headache - POLITICO