On Tuesday, Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick made a surprising admission that he needed to "fundamentally change as a leader and grow up." Kalanick was responding to Uber's latest homegrown scandal, in which the 40-year-old CEO was caught on camera arguing with one of his company's drivers. Kalanick, who is worth more than $6 billion, said in an email to employees that "this is the first time I've been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it." "Leadership help" could mean a lot of things, from executive coaching to a new c-suite level hire. But Uber may need more: after an unending stream of terrible news in 2017, the company should consider replacing Kalanick with an experienced, professional CEO.

Space exploration aficionados experienced the thrill of anticipation in the hours before President Trump's speech Tuesday night, with advance word that he was going to call for a return to the human exploration of space. Sure enough, in his closing words Trump declared that for a country soon to celebrate its 250th anniversary, "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream." Trump's brief, offhand comment had the tone of an impulsive notion that, like so many of his other policy pronouncements, won't get any follow-through. Let's hope so, because the idea of sending humans to explore distant worlds is loopy, incredibly wasteful, and likely to cripple American science rather than inspire it. And that's assuming that Trump's notion doesn't have the ulterior motivation of diverting American scientists from their Job One, which is to fight climate change right here at home.

The UK government has made AI development a key pillar of its digital strategy following a year-long delay to take into account Britain's decision to leave the European Union. In that time there has of course been a change at the top with Theresa May becoming prime minister and Matt Hancock replacing Ed Vaizey as digital minister. Now that the dust has settled the finalised document identifies areas of opportunity and commercialisation for the UK's burgeoning AI research field, including the development of robots by the University of Manchester capable of autonomous operation in hazardous environments and surgical micro-robots by Imperial College London. The review also champions plugging the digital skills gap by training up the workforce with the knowledge necessary to participate in this new economy, amidst fears of a looming recruitment crisis exacerbated by immigration restrictions. Those who have been privy to an early draft of the document have been critical of its ambition, pointing out that much of its content is a rehash of prior initiatives leading to fears that government is too preoccupied by Brexit to give the digital economy its full attention.

Anyone who has access to the Internet has certainly encountered all of the buzz and hype surrounding virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Everything's becoming digitized as we become consumed by new innovations more than ever before, leading many brands to feel overwhelmed to keep up and stand out. What does this exactly mean for brands and marketers? The penetration of breakthrough technological advances like IoT, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality has given way for marketers to approach elements in their marketing stack in a new and innovative way. New capabilities open up the opportunity for brands to reach their target market and provide experiences like never before.

Drones are used for aerial photography, surveillance, news coverage, and rescue operations. Now a group of scientists and researchers are figuring out if drones can make it rain. The science is called cloud seeding, and it is being tested in Nevada at an FAA site, four hours north of Las Vegas. Seeding clouds involves releasing flares of silver iodide from a plane's wing to generate more ice particles in a cloud. This aims to help a cloud's ability to produce and enhance precipitation. The weather conditions need to be right for this to take place--cloud cover and even the presence of storms are optimal.

If you're ever feeling down, do yourself a favor and watch some footage from the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge. This competition of bipedal beasts put robots up against a number of challenges, from turning valves to driving a car. But they struggled to open doors, much less stand for a decent amount of time. Our face-planting future robotic overlords could stand some improvements. Oh, how the world laughed. And oh, how the world gasped when Boston Dynamics dropped a video of its newest bot, Handle, this week.

Researchers claim to have found numerous vulnerabilities across a wide range of robots. Are the human gods creating our future robot overlords bestowing their creations with solid cybersecurity? A pair of hackers think not. The researchers, from security consultancy IOActive, claimed Wednesday to have found a whopping 50 vulnerabilities across components of major home and industrial robots. If exploited, those weaknesses could allow remote control of the machines or reprogramming of their functions, whilst possibly leaking their data, the researchers said.

TOKYO Toshiba Corp has asked a Japanese law firm to help estimate the potential financial impact if it decides its U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse should file for Chapter 11 protection from creditors, sources with knowledge of the matter said.

The University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) is part of a consortium which has received a £4.6 million grant to build a new generation of robots for use in nuclear sites. The funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will help develop smaller robotics technologies that will be able to operate autonomously and effectively in hazardous environments. The cost of cleaning up the UK's existing nuclear facilities has been estimated to be between £95 billion and £219 billion over the next 120 years. The harsh conditions within these facilities means human access is highly restricted and much of the work will need to be completed by robots. Present robotics technology is not capable of completing many of the tasks that will be required.

AI is important to the future of cybersecurity, although some experts don't believe the tech will be a silver bullet. Nonetheless, recent acquisitions show the rising significance of this technology in the fight against cyber criminals. This year through 2/28/2017, there have been three acquisitions of cybersecurity startups that offer AI. All three cybersecurity startups featured in this brief offer machine learning technology, a set of algorithms that are used to train machines to learn from data and predict trends and outcomes. AI is an umbrella term that includes companies using machine learning algorithms for natural language processing, predictive analytics, and pattern recognition, among other things.