It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

TOKYO Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second - or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance - as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second - or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance - as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.

During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

Neil Prakash, an Australian recruiter for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS), was arrested somewhere in the Middle East after surviving drone attacks by the FBI, the New York Times reported Thursday. The 25-year-old, who was linked to militant plots in Australia and had appeared in several ISIS propaganda videos, was believed killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in April. According to the Times, which cited an unnamed senior American military official, Prakash was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year but survived. Another senior U.S. military official reportedly said the former Melbourne resident was arrested some time in the last few weeks by an unidentified Middle Eastern government. Prakash, who converted to Islam from Buddhism and took the name Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, left Australia in 2013 and has been recruiting fighters for ISIS since then.

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these forms of artificial intelligence(A.I.) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.

Wireless carrier competition in the U.S. is white hot -- analysts increasingly see signs of wireless market saturation, meaning that growth is most likely going to come from competitors. Of the four major U.S. carriers, T-Mobile USA has led the way, slashing prices, killing the two-year contract and daring its competitors to follow suit. As competition intensifies, Finnish mobile technology provider Nokia believes customer service will emerge as an even more important key differentiator, and analytics and machine learning will take customer service to the next level in the U.S. and around the globe. In 2011, when AT&T announced its intention to acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom, it looked like the wireless market in the U.S. was well on its way to becoming a duopoly. Verizon Wireless and AT&T already held the lion's share of customers between them, and they both held licenses to the majority of wireless spectrum too.

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming more science fact than science fiction. And despite concerns about thinking machines taking human jobs -- or one day outsmarting their makers -- the federal government's investment in the technology is growing, and could be applied to a wide range of functions, from health care to public safety to criminal justice.

Hoax callers are a special kind of jerk. At best they can cause their targets emotional distress. At worst they can cause or incite property destruction and even divert scarce resources from real emergencies where they are needed to save lives. Technology can sometimes be applied to catch the criminal. Doing so casts technology specialists in the detective role by letting them trace calls to find their origins.

Natural disasters are out of the reach and influence of human beings. However, a lot can be done to minimize loss of lives. Artificial intelligence is one viable option that can potentially prevent massive loss of lives while at the same time make rescue efforts easy and efficient. To learn more, checkout the infographic below created by Eastern Kentucky University's Online Masters in Safety degree program. In the period between 2005 and 2015, a total of 242 natural disasters occurred in the United States of America.