With Congress opening the way for Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, victims' families are focusing on an unproven theory that a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles and a Saudi intelligence operative in San Diego directly assisted two of the 19 hijackers. The alleged Southern California connection is the key to showing that Saudi Arabia financed Muslim extremists who played a direct role in supporting some of the hijackers, according to lawyers for the families of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The families contend that lower-level Saudi operatives in Southern California helped find housing for the two hijackers, both Saudi citizens, months before they muscled their way into the cockpit of an American Airlines passenger jet that smashed into the north side of the Pentagon. If a pending lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the families hope to find the evidence in thousands of classified FBI, CIA and Treasury Department documents that could be made public as part of discovery in federal court. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any direct or indirect support for Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks, or any foreknowledge or involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

NASA may be known for sending men to the moon, establishing the International Space Station, and planning for a base on Mars--but apart from astronauts, its best known spokesmen aren't men at all--they're robots. Rovers like Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, and landers like Viking and Philae, make the perfect ambassadors into hostile, freezing, and nearly airless environments. Not only do these explorers bring back valuable scientific data from Earth's planetary neighbors, they also make perfect showcases for practical robotics. Venus is no one's idea of a vacation home. Its atmosphere is a mixture of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide, and with a surface temperature of 863 degrees Fahrenheit, only the toughest machine could possibly survive on its surface.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – If SpaceX founder Elon Musk's plan to establish a city on Mars sounds like science fiction, then consider the name of his first passenger ship. The answer lies in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the humorous series about the travels and travails of Earth's last surviving man. Musk is leaning toward the name Heart of Gold, the novels' starship with the Infinite Improbability Drive. "I like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability," Musk said in presenting his long-awaited Mars colonization plan this past week, "because I think our ship is also extremely improbable." "But the acronym is not the best," he chuckled.

This paper proposes a general adaptive procedure for budget-limited predictor design in high dimensions called two-stage Sampling, Prediction and Adaptive Regression via Correlation Screening (SPARCS). SPARCS can be applied to high dimensional prediction problems in experimental science, medicine, finance, and engineering, as illustrated by the following. Suppose one wishes to run a sequence of experiments to learn a sparse multivariate predictor of a dependent variable $Y$ (disease prognosis for instance) based on a $p$ dimensional set of independent variables $\mathbf X=[X_1,\ldots, X_p]^T$ (assayed biomarkers). Assume that the cost of acquiring the full set of variables $\mathbf X$ increases linearly in its dimension. SPARCS breaks the data collection into two stages in order to achieve an optimal tradeoff between sampling cost and predictor performance. In the first stage we collect a few ($n$) expensive samples $\{y_i,\mathbf x_i\}_{i=1}^n$, at the full dimension $p\gg n$ of $\mathbf X$, winnowing the number of variables down to a smaller dimension $l < p$ using a type of cross-correlation or regression coefficient screening. In the second stage we collect a larger number $(t-n)$ of cheaper samples of the $l$ variables that passed the screening of the first stage. At the second stage, a low dimensional predictor is constructed by solving the standard regression problem using all $t$ samples of the selected variables. SPARCS is an adaptive online algorithm that implements false positive control on the selected variables, is well suited to small sample sizes, and is scalable to high dimensions. We establish asymptotic bounds for the Familywise Error Rate (FWER), specify high dimensional convergence rates for support recovery, and establish optimal sample allocation rules to the first and second stages.

This might be one of the most dangerous yet breath-taking car journeys in the world. A new drone video has emerged showing the dangerous mountain tunnel chiselled out of a vertical cliff in Taihang Mountains. The footage, posted to Youtube by CCTV News yesterday, is believed to capture the awe-inspiring Guoliang tunnel in central China's Henan Province. The formidable Guoliang tunnel was hand-carved by 13 men from an ancient village perched on top of the cliff at an altitude of over 1,700 metres (5,500 feet). The 1,250-metre-long (4,100 feet) passage is the only way to drive to the 600-year-old Guoliang village, which perches on top of the 200-metre-tall (656 feet) cliff.

If Hillary Clinton's'homebrew' server ever got the Mary Shelley treatment, IT specialist Bryan Pagliano would make a fine Dr. Frankenstein – FBI documents reveal new details about how he painstakingly created the machine over a series of months while working in a room along Washington's storied K Street. According to files released last Friday evening, Pagliano worked to design and build the now-infamous server inside a room once used as part of Clinton's campaign headquarters. On the street known as Washington's power corridor, Pagliano even used computer remnants from Clinton's failed 2008 presidential bid, where he had worked as an IT specialist. The story of how the server came into existence became clearer thanks to witness interviews known as 302s. Though they were highly redacted, the bureau files include new details Pagliano revealed in a June 24 interview with the FBI.

The Department of Defense announced on Friday that it is investing 100 million in a drone base located in Agadez, in central Niger. The base will serve as a central surveillance hub in the fight against both Boko Haram and roaming militant groups linked to al Qaeda. "At the request of, and in close coordination with, the Government of Niger, United States Africa Command is establishing a temporary, expeditionary cooperative security location in Agadez, Niger," a US Africa Command spokesperson told Reuters via email. "Agadez is an ideal, central location to enable ISR collection (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to face the security threat across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin region." The US already has a military presence in both Agadez and the national capital, Niamey.

New York City has created a 5-million fund for women working in the fields of film and theater, becoming the first municipality in the U.S. to finance such an initiative. The fund, announced Thursday by the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, will provide grants to support film and theater projects by and about women. New York also will hold workshops and a film-financing conference designed to connect women with money for their projects; conduct a screenwriting competition that culminates in a series to air on New York's Channel 25; broadcast an additional block of programming on Channel 25 devoted to women; and fund research about gender in the field of film directing. "We believe we're the first municipality in the country to take on this issue," MOME Commissioner Julie Menin said. "We think by creating these economic pathways of opportunity, that is one of the best ways we can contribute."

The first comic that cartoonist Gene Luen Yang ever bought was a two-in-one issue that featured a man made out of rocks and an intergalactic cyborg. He loved comics, especially the kind that featured space aliens. So he started making his own. He and a friend drew comics and sold them for 50 cents each. Among their earliest creations were the "Trans-Smurfers," Smurfs who transformed into robotic fruit. They also flew and fought crime.