Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

I listened to this podcast on my drive to Michigan last Friday. If you like to think about the future, and where the puck is going, put your headphones on and listen critically. What is revealed is the way machine learning can be used to create biased and unbiased conclusions. It's always been known that if you start with the wrong hypothesis when using statistical analysis, you will reach a bad conclusion. There is a humorous blog, Spurious Correlations, that turns statistics on its head.

Here's how it usually happens: Technology comes first, and the law follows. Airplanes first flew across the skies long before control towers popped up, and cellphones were ubiquitous long before texting-while-driving was outlawed. It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to predict all the ways in which transformative new machines will change the world. That doesn't, and shouldn't, stop people from trying. U.S. Department of Transportation officials on Tuesday unveiled long-awaited policy guidelines for self-driving cars, issuing a sweeping document that reveals how the nation's top transportation leaders plan to regulate new technology that promises to make the roads vastly safer. The guidelines clearly demonstrate the federal government's support for driverless cars, and serve as a regulatory blueprint to "accelerate the HAV [highly autonomous vehicle] revolution" safely and consistently across the nation, the document says.

Saying they were doing something no other government has done, Obama administration officials rolled out a plan Tuesday they say will enable automakers to get self-driving cars onto the road without compromising safety. In drawing up 112 pages of guidelines, the government tried to be vague enough to allow innovation while at the same time making sure that car makers, tech companies and ride-hailing firms put safety first as the cars are developed. Only time will tell whether the mission was accomplished, but the document generally was praised by businesses and analysts as good guidance in a field that's evolving faster than anyone imagined just a few years ago. "How do you regulate a complex software system?" asked Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame University professor who has written about the future of automation. "They want to allow innovation, but they want to be very proscriptive in managing the risk side of this. In my mind, they're trying to manage the unknown."

Graphic courtesy CSBA AFA: The Air Force wants artificial intelligence to track and react to cyber and electronic threats, to update countermeasures against enemy hackers, radars, and missiles faster than human minds can manage. But first you have to fix the basics.

SHANGHAI--A Chinese man whose son was killed while driving a Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -0.82 % vehicle applied to a local Beijing court to investigate whether the car's Autopilot driving system was engaged. In January, 23-year-old Gao Yaning died in a crash in the northeastern province of Hebei while driving a Tesla Model S. Six months later his father, Gao Jubin, filed a lawsuit accusing Tesla of exaggerating Autopilot's capabilities. At a court hearing Tuesday, he asked for an independent investigation of the cause of the crash. "The family insists the investigation should be done by a third party, rather than Tesla," said Cui Qiuna, a lawyer for the Gao family. The court will study the family's request.

For California state officials, the new federal guidelines on testing and deployment of driverless cars come as a bit of a relief. Until this week, the absence of U.S. government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles -- generally in charge…

Asteroid mining is coming soon to a planet near you: this planet, and in 2021, to be specific. But NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission has lots of work to do before that point. Today the space-faring organization issued an official "request for proposal" from four partners on how they would go about creating the robotic spacecraft that would perform the actual asteroid redirection in question. This mission is a bit different from OSIRIS-REx, which recently got underway. The idea there is to go to an asteroid, grab a piece and return it to Earth -- difficult enough, but it wouldn't be the first collection of "live" asteroid matter -- that was already achieved by the Japanese probe Hayabusa a few years ago (an astonishing achievement, by the way).