A 1,200-acre wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County has forced officials to postpone the launch of a commercial satellite, authorities said. The Atlas V rocket was scheduled to take off Sunday and carry the WorldView-4, a commercial satellite that snaps high-resolution images of Earth, according to United Launch Alliance, the contractor hired to launch the satellite. But a wildfire broke out Saturday in a remote canyon at the southern end of the military base and quickly spread to nearly two square miles, according to Wayne Seda, the assistant chief of the Vandenberg Fire Department. "It's burning in some very tough vegetation," Seda told reporters Sunday. It jumped roads at times and came out of the containment lines."

An easy day trip from London, Bletchley Park reveals there's far more to Britain's wartime code breaking than Alan Turing's battle with the Nazi Enigma machine. There are plenty of cool nerdy places to visit in London, from the British Library to Greenwich, but if you've got a little more time on your hands it's worth the trip up to Bletchley Park to see the how the Brits turned the tide of the war by eavesdropping on Hitler's seemingly uncrackable wartime communications systems. Bletchley Park mansion is roughly an hour's drive north of London, just off the M1. Alternatively you can catch the London Midland train – the mansion is only a short walk from Bletchley Park station – or else the Virgin Train to Milton Keynes Central and take a quick train or bus trip back to Bletchley Park. Purchased by MI6 just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the mansion initially served as home to the Government Code and Cypher School.

President Vladimir Putin's ruling party easily outdistanced its rivals in parliamentary elections Sunday, but it was a lackluster victory that suggested the Russian leader's brand may be growing stale. United Russia, the pro-Kremlin behemoth an opposition leader once dubbed the "party of crooks and thieves," won less than 45% of the vote for 450 seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, according to preliminary results announced by the Central Election Committee on Sunday night. No other party came close. The nationalist LDPR party and the Communists competed for the second spot with 18% and 17% of the vote, respectively. Still, it was United Russia's lowest result in 15 years – and came in an election with turnout of less than 40% of eligible voters.

A breakthrough will allow machines to learn by observing. This Turing Learning, as its inventors have named it, promises smarter drones that could detect militants engaging in behavior that could endanger troops, like planting roadside bombs. Still in its infancy, the new machine learning technique is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, whose famous test challenges artificial intelligences to fool a human into thinking he or she is conversing with another human. In Turing learning, a program dubbed the "classifier" tries to learn about a system designed to fool it. In certain ways, Turing Learning resembles many existing machine-learning systems.

States across the Southeast are experiencing sharp jumps in gas prices after a major gasoline pipeline ruptured in central Alabama, spilling as many as 336,000 gallons of fuel upstream from a national wildlife refuge. But thanks to a few strokes of luck, the environmental damage is minimal. The pipeline breached near an old coal mine pit, and much of the fuel flowed into a water retention pond. With local streams dry -- much of central Alabama is suffering from moderate to severe drought -- the gasoline did not find its way down into the Cahaba River, home to 64 rare and endangered plant and animal species, including the Cahaba lily. "We really did bypass the bullet," said Myra Crawford, executive director at Cahaba Riverkeeper, which has been monitoring the area by canoe and foot."It

In the deadliest attack against Indian forces in more than a decade, militants sneaked into an army encampment in the disputed territory of Kashmir early Sunday and opened fire on sleeping soldiers, killing at least 17 and wounding dozens. The four assailants, who also threw grenades that caused tents and temporary shelters to catch fire at the army brigade headquarters at Uri, were killed in a gun battle with security forces that lasted six hours, authorities said. Indian officials blamed the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed for the attack, saying it had recovered weapons from the assailants that carried Pakistani markings. Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh, the director of military operations, said he contacted his Pakistani counterpart to convey "serious concerns." Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh was more pointed, saying on Twitter: "Pakistan is a terrorist state, and it should be identified and isolated as such."

Americans who endured the brutal 2007-2009 recession and slow recovery now are seeing an economic sunrise: Wages are up, jobs are growing and more families are lifting themselves up out of poverty. And yet, dark clouds are still hanging over millions of Americans. No set of sunny statistics can help an unemployed coal miner in Kentucky pay the mortgage. Upbeat wage data won't reassure a Michigan factory worker who is nervously watching robots replace his co-workers. In this election cycle, candidates are responding to voters' anger and anxiety about an economy that -- yes, has improved dramatically -- but still feels uneven and unfair to many.

Let's be honest, stupid humans are too smart sometimes for their own good and Skynet is going to happen, at least that's what Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think, but what do they know? In 2014, Stephen Hawking wrote: "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history, – Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets." In a separate interview in the same year, he warned: "humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded by A.I." In a Reddit Q&A Session in January 2015 Gates said: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

Modern radar and communications systems can subtly and quickly change their character, making them harder for U.S. aircraft and other platforms to jam or spoof. That reality is prompting DARPA to lead industry teams to apply artificial intelligence to electronic warfare. The difference between today's tech and that of the 1970s lies in the adoption of readily available digital processing. Such processing effectively allows operators to change aspects of the waveforms that radar and communications systems use. "The problem now is that if we continue to rely on that [old] approach, the radar waveforms we're expecting could be rapidly changed," Tilghman says.

It's official: Self-driving cars are here. This week Uber's autonomous taxi fleet picked up its first passengers in Pittsburgh, while Ford announced that its self-driving car will have no steering wheel, gas pedal, or brakes. Ford is also working on cars that can harvest drinking water from thin air -- and then dispense it from a dashboard tap. In other auto news, the Chevy Bolt scored an EPA-certified driving range of 238 miles -- further than the base Tesla Model S. Tesla sued an oil exec for allegedly impersonating Elon Musk to steal trade secrets. And design studio Duffy London debuted the solar-powered super yacht of the future.