This fall, an unusual vessel will begin sea trials off the coast of California. The 51-foot-long Boeing Echo Voyager will have no crew. It will glide underwater for days or weeks, quietly collecting data from the ocean floor to send back to crews on ships or on land. Ever since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military has relied more and more on flying drones to take on dangerous air missions. But increasingly, drones are taking to the sea as well.

They may look more like small caravans, but these four wheeled vehicles are really driverless buses. A pair of the vehicles will be hitting the streets of Helsinki, thanks to Finland's laws allowing cars to roam without a driver. The EasyMile autonomous mini-buses will be navigating the city from mid-September. They may look more like small caravans, but these four wheeled vehicles are really driverless buses. A pair of the vehicles will be hitting the streets of Helsinki, thanks to Finland's laws allowing cars to roam without a driver The buses are amongt the first in the world, which have recently been given the go-ahead by transport safety authorities.

Think you have what it takes to build a robot astronaut? NASA could use your help. The space agency on Tuesday opened registration for a new competition aimed at developing "the capabilities of humanoid robots to help astronauts on the journey to Mars." Teams competing in the Space Robots Challenge must program a virtual robot, modeled after NASA's Robonaut 5 (R5), to complete a series of complex tasks in a simulated Mars environment. Winners will take home 1 million. The competition will be held in a virtual environment, and each team's R5 will be challenged to resolve the aftermath of a dust storm that has damaged a Martian habitat.

The South African Jewish computer scientist and educator Seymour Papert, who died on July 31 at age 88, was a long-time fixture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pioneered artificial intelligence and co-invented the Logo programming language. Yet his work as a social reformer, rather than with machines per se, was a primordial obsession. The human rights activist Janet Levine's memoir "Inside Apartheid" describes how during her childhood in the early 1950s, the Papert family lived not far from her Johannesburg home. Their son Seymour, a university student, was "'in trouble' with the government for his student political activities. My father said that he did not know why someone as talented as Seymour would throw his life away'for the Schwartzes' (a derogatory Yiddish expression for black people)."

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

OSIRIS-REx, NASA's first spacecraft designed to travel to a near-Earth asteroid, will be launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force base in Florida at 7:05 p.m. EDT on Sept. 8, the space agency said in a statement Wednesday. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer will travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu with the aim of mapping its surface and identifying, collecting and returning pristine samples of high science value. "This mission exemplifies our nation's quest to boldly go and study our solar system and beyond to better understand the universe and our place in it," Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in the statement. "NASA science is the greatest engine of scientific discovery on the planet and OSIRIS-REx embodies our directorate's goal to innovate, explore, discover, and inspire." The 4,600 pound spacecraft, which will be launched aboard an Atlas V 411 rocket, will reach the asteroid in 2018.

For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it's true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for. Our founders--Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly--all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way.

SINGAPORE – Sherine Toh says her best days at work are when none of the 600 or so staff members at Singapore's Tung Lok Restaurants quits, though such days are rare. The Chinese restaurant group is one of the thousands of businesses struggling with a labor crunch caused by curbs on foreign workers that threaten the city-state's already feeble growth rates. "It has gotten much tougher compared to the old days, five years back," said Toh, who has at least 20 vacancies to fill at any one time as head of human resources. The group closed some outlets because of the shortage. The city's restaurants, hotels and retailers have become the biggest casualties of the labor crunch since Singapore accelerated restrictions on foreign workers in 2011 as political disquiet about immigration grew.

A new astronaut will join the roster to help facilitate man's first trip to Mars. Nasa is recruiting teams to develop and display the ability of a Robonaut 5 (R5) robot with a series of tasks that could save astronauts' lives in space. Called Space Robotics Challenge, the million dollar contest will create an AI robot to act as an astronaut's assistant. Nasa has launched a competition encouraging teams to develop and display the ability of a Robonaut 5 robot (pictured) with a series of tasks in a virtual environment. Each team's R5 will be will be challenged with resolving the aftermath of a dust storm that has damaged a Martian habitat.

NASA's six foot, 300-pound humanoid robot is looking for a programmer. This week, NASA announced the start of the Space Robotics Challenge, a 1 million contest to program a virtual robot. Competing teams will be tasked with programming Robonaut 5, a humanoid robot, how to perform damage control after a Martian dust storm that has damaged a habitat. As part of this, they'll need to use the robot to complete three objectives: align a communications dish, repair a solar array, and fix a leak in the hab. Registration is open now, with the final round of competition held in June 2017. Robonaut also goes by the name Valkyrie at MIT, which we first met in 2013 as a DARPA challenge entrant.