It's no secret that the U.S. military sees artificial intelligence in its future, for everything from swarming drones to automated cybersecurity practices. And despite its clear potential for military applications, top Pentagon researchers also have acknowledged that AI currently has a lot of limitations--machines can parse greater amounts of information more quickly than humans, but they still can't think like humans. But although machines can't really understand the human mind, humans might be falling behind in understanding the machines they've created. That's part of what's behind an effort by military researchers called Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which looks to create tools that allow a human on the receiving end of information or a decision from an AI machine to understand the reasoning that produced it. In essence, the machine needs to explain its thinking.

SpaceX's spacecraft Dragon splashed down into the the Pacific Friday morning, just off Mexico's Baja California coast. On board the capsule were 3,000 pounds of scientific research and equipment delivered back to Earth from the International Space Station. "Good splashdown of Dragon confirmed," SpaceX reported via Twitter, as its employees readied to retrieve the capsule, which also had 12 mice onboard. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who joined the space station crew in July, along with Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, released the capsule into space at 6:11 a.m. The space laboratory was orbiting over Australia at the time.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.

Earlier this year, the union representing U.S. airport security agents called for hiring 6,000 additional screeners to reduce long waits and help handle the rise in summer travelers. Government positions -- especially those at an agency like the Transportation Security Administration -- require a rigorous screening process in which officials might consider 100 employees for every one hire made. Airport security is clearly an area that could benefit from automation. Through a process known as organizational change management, TSA could automate some entry-level IT jobs that were previously handled by tech employees and repurpose those employees to ease the demand for additional security screeners. Automation allows employees to focus on more complex tasks, and artificial intelligence-based technology can handle knowledge work in a fraction of the time and with no errors -- a level of performance humans can't match.

It's smart torpedoes that wait, like mines, until special sounds wake them up and tell them to attack. Last summer, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board commissioned a study to examine angles on a particular challenge for DoD, with participants drawn from consulting, defense and technical industries, as well as the military and academia. In possibly the worst John Lennon cover ever made, participants were asked to "Imagine if….We could covertly deploy networks of smart mines and UUVs [Unmanned Underwater Vehicles] to blockade and deny the sea surface, differentiating between fishing vessels and fighting ships… …and not put U.S. Service personnel or high-value assets at risk." The scenario, and several others like it, were at the core of the study on autonomy, specifically autonomous machines and computers and systems, and what they mean for the Pentagon and the wars of the future. This matters a great deal, because what the Pentagon thinks of autonomy will shape the weapons it orders and the way it fights wars, and, likely, the way that laws of war are written.

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

Amy Kennedy, Education Director of the Kennedy Forum, and wife of Patrick J. Kennedy, honoree, advocate and former U.S. Representative from Rhode Island, speaks on stage at 2016 Many Faces Of Mental Health Gala at The Pierre Hotel on April 12, 2016 in New York City. In recent months, the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of precision medicine has continuously progressed. In fact, its influence has not only concentrated in transforming healthcare systems but also revolutionizing the approaches when it comes to diagnosing diseases such as cancer, autism and now, mental health disorders. Artificial intelligence has indeed proven its potential and significance in various field of sciences. With the integration of AI into the medical field, a promising future awaits the full utilization of data-driven medicine, which was dubbed as healthcare transformation's "next frontier," Parent Herald previously noted. After proving that artificial intelligence can be useful in the diagnosis of cancer, eye diseases, autism and even in cosmetic medicine, experts found that AI's machine learning approach can potentially assist them in diagnosing mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorders.

Humans pick up on sarcasm instinctively and usually do not need help figuring out if, say, a social media post has a mocking tone. Machines have a much tougher time with this because they are typically programmed to read text and assess images based strictly on what they see. Nothing, unless computer scientists could help machines better understand wordplay used in social media and on the internet. And it looks like they may be on the verge of doing just that. Just what you needed--a sarcasm-detection engine that helps marketers tell whether you were praising or mocking their product, and adjust their messages to sell you more stuff.

Rackspace sells for 4.3 billion to Apollo Global Cloud Integration Market (2016-2021) - Key Players are IBM, MuleSoft & NEC Corporation ... Cloud player Rackspace goes private in 4.3B deal Rackspace jumps after Apollo Global buys it in 4.3 billion deal

NASA video shows a robotic arm releasing the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the International Space Station over Australia. A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule left the International Space Station on Friday, Aug. 26, 2016. The capsule is carrying 3,000 pounds of cargo after a month at the outpost. CAPE CANAVERAL -- A SpaceX Dragon capsule returned to Earth on Friday after staying more than a month at the International Space Station. A robotic arm released the unmanned capsule packed with 3,000 pounds of cargo at 6:11 a.m.