Nasa is planning ambitious mission that will see a robotic spaceship visit an asteroid to create an orbiting base for astronauts. The robot ship will pluck a large boulder off the space rock and sling it around the moon, becoming a destination to prepare for future human missions to Mars. Nasa plans to study the asteroid for about a year and test deflection techniques that one day may be necessary to save Earth from a potentially catastrophic collision. Although the target asteroid is not expected to be officially selected until 2020, NASA is using 2008 EV5 as the reference asteroid while the search continues for potential alternates. Before beginning its trip to lunar orbit, the ARM spacecraft will demonstrate a widely supported asteroid deflection technique called a gravity tractor.

Whether you are based in Washington or Beijing, automation anxiety is something that could be keeping you awake at night. What will the future of work look like if more and more companies replace humans with machines? The leaders of two of the world's biggest economies, US President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jingping, met this week to discuss business and trade. They oversee a workforce of 900 million people. In the past, Trump has blamed China for taking US jobs.

Inspite of all the current hype, AI is not a new field of study, but it has its ground in the fifties. If we exclude the pure philosophical reasoning path that goes from the Ancient Greek to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Pascal, AI as we know it has been officially started in 1956 at Dartmouth College, where the most eminent experts gathered to brainstorm on intelligence simulation. This happened only a few years after Asimov set his own three laws of robotics, but more relevantly after the famous paper published by Turing (1950), where he proposes for the first time the idea of a thinking machine and the more popular Turing test to assess whether such machine shows, in fact, any intelligence. As soon as the research group at Dartmouth publicly released the contents and ideas arisen from that summer meeting, a flow of government funding was reserved for the study of creating a nonbiological intelligence. Atthat time, AI seemed to be easily reachable, but it turned out that was not the case.

The implantable device aims to convert neurons in the brain into electronic signals and provide unprecedented "data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA statement announcing the new project. DARPA sees the implant as providing a foundation for new therapies that could help people with deficits in sight or hearing by "feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain." A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications. But some experts see such an implant as having the potential for numerous applications, including military ones, in the field of wearable robotics -- which aims to augment and restore human performance. Conor Walsh, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Harvard University, told CNN that the implant would "change the game," adding that "in the future, wearable robotic devices will be controlled by implants."

The last time we mentioned the Navy's long-range MQ-4C Triton drone was in 2013, and the project is still creeping towards eventual deployment. Northrop Grumman announced this week that it has completed formal lab testing, and also successfully flew for the first time with a software upgrade adding "Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), multi-aircraft control and additional Multi-Function Active Sensor (MFAS) radar modes." Once it's ready, this autonomous vehicle is intended for providing intelligence and recon during flights that can last up to 24 hours at a time, allowing it to monitor 1 million square miles of the ocean. The plan now is for the MQ-4C to enter "Early Operational Capability (EOC)" deployment next year.

Cassini, the spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn for 13 years, is running out of fuel and nearing the end of its mission. Over the next few months, Cassini will dive into the space between Saturn and its rings, moving closer and closer to the planet until it eventually disintegrates in its atmosphere in September. This week, NASA released a short animation showing these final moments, set to a majestic, brassy overture. "On its final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn, fighting to keep its antenna pointed at Earth as it transmits its farewell," a comforting voice narrates as the music swells. "In the skies of Saturn, the journey ends, as Cassini becomes part of the planet itself."

From a Pluto lander that hops like a bunny to a tube that shakes astronauts to simulate Earthlike gravity, NASA is investing in our science fiction future. On 6 April, NASA announced funding for 22 technology proposals under its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) programme. This programme allows researchers to pursue their so-crazy-it-just-might-work ideas for revolutionising space travel and research. This year, 15 new proposals got Phase I funding of about $125,000 over 9 months, and 7 projects that already made it through Phase I got Phase II funding of up to $500,000 over 2 years. All of the projects funded by NAIC are still early in their development – it will be a decade or longer before any of the concepts are likely to be used in an actual mission.

What then needs to be done in order to shift the balance to other regions? We need to build more "AI ecosystems". If there are more ecosystems focused on AI, then everyone will be better prepared for what researchers, the business community, analysts and investors identify as the "next big thing". Moreover, creating more ecosystems of this kind will help policymakers better address the challenges, opportunities and even the threat created by the implementation of artificial intelligence. But, in pursuing this goal, we need to realize that we don't need any sort of ecosystem, but the "right kind" of ecosystem.

From a vacuum Martian airship to an artificial gravity chamber, NASA has revealed a host of new proposals that could push human and robotic exploration of space even further. The space agency is investing in 22 early-stage projects for further development, many of which tap into ideas that once existed only in science fiction. While the radical projects could take years before they can be used in a NASA mission, if at all, the agency says they could soon'expand how we explore the universe.' Among the proposals, NASA invested in a radical idea to create a sci-fi-like Mach Effect Thruster propulsion system. This would produce thrust'without the irreversible ejection of propellant, eliminating the need to carry propellant' NASA has selected Phase I and II awards for its 2017 Innovative Advanced Concepts portfolio.

As government agencies are beginning to turn over security to automated systems that can teach themselves, the idea that hackers can sneakily influence those systems is becoming the latest (and perhaps the greatest) new concern for cybersecurity professionals. Adversarial machine learning is a research field that "lies at the intersection of machine learning and computer security," according to Wikipedia. "It aims to enable the safe adoption of machine-learning techniques in adversarial settings like spam filtering, malware detection and biometric recognition." According to Nicolas Papernot, Google PhD Fellow in Security at Pennsylvania State University, AML seeks to better understand the behavior of machine-learning algorithms once they are deployed in adversarial settings -- that is, "any setting where the adversary has an incentive, may it be financial or of some other nature, to force the machine-learning algorithms to misbehave." "Unfortunately, current machine-learning models have a large attack surface as they were designed and trained to have good average performance, but not necessarily worst-case performance, which is typically what is sought after from a security perspective," Papernot said.