Humans are formed from matter that flew billions of miles from another galaxy, according to a new study. Much of the stuff around us and spread throughout our Milky Way is made up of "extragalactic matter", according to the research. The study used computer models to find out how the matter around us came to be acquired by our galaxy. It found that supernova explosions throw out huge amounts of matter from galaxies, spreading it throughout the universe as it is carried on powerful galactic winds. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and Space X, recently sounded the alarm that murderous artificial intelligence-powered robots could one day rampage through American neighborhoods. And the only way to stop them, he said, is to begin regulating AI before it destroys us all. Musk's warnings that AI poses an "existential threat" may have been a bit dramatic, but he's not the only expert hoping for some kind of government regulation of AI. And as companies from Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) to Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) continue pouring money into the field, those regulations may be needed sooner than later. Carnegie Mellon's Manuela Veloso, an expert on AI, doesn't believe we're even close to the point where an army of T-1000s will march down Broadway and demand our fealty. But we should have regulations of any AI-created products that reach the mass market to ensure the safety of consumers, according to Veloso, department head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.

One of the IoT's greatest attributes is its ability to integrate and work with other emerging technologies, as I wrote recently regarding the synergies between the IoT and blockchain. Perhaps nowhere are these synergies as great as with the IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI). One very down-to-earth (OK, down-to-living-room-carpet) example will illustrate. My Roomba was one of the first smart-home devices. It's dogged, and eventually cleans a room by bouncing around and following a pretty random path.

Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition. The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features and generates appropriate explanation between them.

Taiwanese electronics juggernaut and leading Apple supplier Foxconn announced Wednesday that it intends to invest $10 billion in a new manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, where it plans to make LCD panels bound for computers, healthcare devices, and even vehicles. The White House touted the announcement as a victory for senior adviser Jared Kushner's Office of American Innovation, and marked it as a milestone in President Trump's promise to bring manufacturing back to the United States. "Foxconn joins a growing list of industry leaders who understand that America's capabilities are limitless and that America's workers are unmatched," President Trump said at the White House announcement, flanked by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou. Yet, the 3,000 jobs Foxconn says it will create in Wisconsin aren't the kind of manufacturing jobs that so many laid off auto and steel workers have been clamoring for. Nor are they a pathway to the American-made iPhone President Trump promised during the 2016 election.

Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers will order travelers to take all devices larger than a cellphone out of their bag and put them in a bin by themselves. Prior rules required only laptops to be removed for separate screening. Officials say it gives X-ray screeners a clearer picture of the devices. Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles (stock image) TSA said the new rules have been in place in a pilot project at ten American airports and will expand to all US airports in the months ahead.

Facebook on Wednesday reported a surge in profits in the past quarter, fueled by strong growth in money-making ads to its more than two billion users. Net profit in the second quarter leapt 71 percent from a year ago to $3.9 billion while revenue climbed 45 percent to $9.3 billion. In after-hours trade, Facebook shares rose some two percent to $166.83 on the stronger-than-expected results. Recent reports suggest Facebook may be working on its own smart speaker to compete with Google Home and Amazon Echo in the budding market for home digital assistants. Facebook could also be working on a smartphone, according to paperwork recently spotted by cyber sleuths which the tech giant filed earlier this year.

As it is typical for any realpolitik, citizens are becoming less relevant in digital realpolitik. They are personally targeted in advertising and surveillance efforts by corporations and governments. Individuals per se are getting lost in big numbers. The individual is just one amongst billions of Facebook users, and just one amongst billions of contributors to Google searches. Governments are increasingly speaking about digital sovereignty and less about the empowerment of individuals. Citizens are becoming more and more the object of digital growth and less and less the engine behind it, as it has been since the early days of the Internet. On a promising note, realpolitik provides a more realistic picture of interests and risks as well as winners and losers resulting from Internet developments. It is in this way that realpolitik can contribute to creating the basis for more solid and sustainable Internet development. Governments are likely to continue striking deals with Internet companies in order to recuperate some taxes. The bilateral deals could be the building blocks for a more structured approach to revenues from the digital economy.

Ford's automotive revenue of $37 billion was in line with Wall Street's expectations. Total revenue rose 1 percent to $39.85 billion. The elevated performance in the second quarter was due mostly to a lowering of the company's corporate tax rate, from 30 percent down to 10 percent, Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks acknowledged. Ford has put some overseas losses back on its books in anticipation of changes in the U.S. corporate tax code, Shanks said. The company expects to have a 15 percent rate this year, but that will return to 30 percent next year.

At the University of Washington (UW) Medical Center, a radiotherapy system shoots high-powered radiation beams into the heads of patients, to treat cancers of the tongue and esophagus. Any software errors in the system could prove fatal, so engineers at the medical center have teamed with a group of computer scientists from the university to ensure the system will not fail, and that the beam will shut off if prescribed settings go out of tolerance. This is made possible by a process known as software verification, and verifying implementations of critical systems like that radiotherapy setup is one of the things about which Zachary Tatlock is passionate. Over three years ago, Tatlock was a Ph.D. candidate giving a talk at the university on his thesis research in program verification. The lead engineer for the medical center's radiotherapy team was in the audience, and asked Tatlock how they could apply verification to that system.