House Republicans are fighting to retain control of the chamber this fall, and they face looming priorities like stemming the Zika crisis and averting a government shutdown on a Sept. 30 funding deadline. But on Wednesday, they spent some a few lighter moments reviewing how the partisan divide can often be found on popular dating sites like OkCupid. At their first private session after returning from the long summer recess, House Republicans closed with a cheeky presentation on the interests most cited by liberals and conservatives in their dating profiles. "Yoga" ranked high among liberals; "Marines" by conservatives, according to a GOP source granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The presentation was based on a study released in July by OkCupid. GOP Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield is known for lightening up the often rocky GOP huddles, sometimes by showing movie clips.

Tomorrow Nasa hopes to launch a spacecraft on its journey towards an asteroid, where it will collect and return samples that experts believe may hold the building blocks of life. Nasa's OSRIS-REx spacecraft will travel for two years to reach Bennu, and plans to return to Earth in 2023. Fitted with sensors, the craft will map out the surface of the asteroid in order to address basic questions about the composition of the very early solar system. Nasa will launch a spacecraft on its journey towards an asteroid, where it will collect and return samples that experts believe may hold the building blocks of life. Nasa's OSIRIS-REx will travel for two years to reach Bennu (illustration pictured) Thanks to observations from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, scientists already know the roundish Bennu is about 1,600 feet (487 metres) across at its bulging middle and the colour of coal, indicative of carbon richness.

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

Darktrace, the U.K. cybersecurity startup whose backers include Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's Invoke Capital, has closed 65 million in fresh funding. The new round was led by global investment firm KKR, with participation from existing investor Summit Partners and new investors TenEleven Ventures and SoftBank. I understand the new investment gives the 2013-founded company a valuation of more than 400 million, while in a call Lynch told me the new backing was a typical growth round and will be used for further international expansion and for R&D. In particular, he said Darktrace is developing technology to help companies respond to not only human-written cyberattacks but also the pending threat of machine-learning-based attacks that, in classic sci-fi-comes-true-fashion, will increasingly see AI battling it out with AI on behalf of the good and bad folks, respectively. But let's step back and take a look at what Darktrace offers today.

If Japan, home to the world's largest public debt, wanted to save a bundle, it would close the Bank of Japan. Auctioning off its giant neo-baroque headquarter buildings around the nation and pink-slipping roughly 4,900 full-time employees would cheer Moody's and Standard & Poor's and plug holes in the national balance sheet. That's not going to happen, of course. But imagine if the BOJ had closed shop 17 years ago, right after it first cut interest rates to zero, and turned its function over to a computer program. Would the artificial-intelligence version of the BOJ be any closer to 2 percent inflation than the well-compensated humans occupying its buildings?

Michigan would no longer require that someone be inside a self-driving car while testing it on public roads under bills up for a vote in the Legislature. The change is expected to win Senate approval Wednesday and likely reach Gov. Rick Snyder's desk within months. The legislation is designed to keep the U.S. auto industry's home state ahead of the curve on autonomous vehicles. A researcher wouldn't have to be present in a self-driving test car. But he or she would be required to "promptly" take control of its movements if necessary.

Editor's Note: Last month, Dark Reading editors named Deep Instinct the most innovative startup in its first annual Best of Black Hat Innovation Awards program at Black Hat 2016 in Las Vegas. As you reach for a water bottle, you don't pause to analyze its material, size or shape in order to determine whether it's a water bottle. Instead, you immediately reach for it, with complete confidence in its identification. If I show the same water bottle to any traditional computer vision module, it will easily recognize it. If I partially obstruct the image with my fingers, then traditional computer vision modules will have difficulty recognizing it.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – NASA is going after an asteroid this week like never before. It's launching a spacecraft to the exotic black rock named Bennu, vacuuming up handfuls of gravel from the surface, and then in a grand finale, delivering the pay dirt all the way back to Earth. The mission will take seven years, from Thursday night's planned liftoff from Cape Canaveral to the return of the asteroid samples in 2023, and cover an incredible 4 billion miles (6½ billion km) through space. It promises to be the biggest cosmic bounty since the Apollo moon rocks, hand-picked and delivered by astronauts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. NASA has already brought back comet dust and specks of solar wind.

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.