America's stealth submarines and being used to carry out cyberattacks and listen in on enemy computer networks, two US Navy officials have revealed. The secret offence capabilities were revealed at a recent Washington conference. 'There is a -- an offensive capability that we are, that we prize very highly,' said Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, the U.S. Navy's program executive officer for submarines, at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington. It has previously been revealed the USS Annapolis (pictured) is among the submarines being used. 'This is where I really can't talk about much, but suffice to say we have submarines out there on the front lines that are very involved, at the highest technical level, doing exactly the kind of things that you would want them to do.'

Erik Birkeneder is an intellectual property attorney at Nixon Peabody focused on digital health and medical device companies. Artificial intelligence originally aspired to replace doctors. Researchers imagined robots that could ask you questions, run the answers through an algorithm that would learn with experience and tell whether you had the flu or a cold. However, those promises largely failed, as artificial intelligent algorithms were too rudimentary to perform those functions. Particularly tricky was the variability between people, which caused basic machine learning algorithms to miss the patterns.

Laura Hatfield and Sherri Rose are Assistant Professors specializing in biostatistics at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Health Care Policy. Laura received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota and Sherri completed her PhD in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. They are developing novel statistical methods for health policy problems. Rose: I'd definitely say a statistician. Even when I'm working on things that fall into the categories of data science or machine learning, there's underlying statistical theory guiding that process, be it for methods development or applications.

Beyond the safety of Earth, robots are paving the way for human exploration of the solar system, reaching out to sniff atmospheres and taste alien soils. For many of these, the target in their sights is Mars, leading the way for a manned mission to the planet. Now planetary scientists are looking to one of these robotic explorers to help them unlock the secrets hidden in Mars' rocky interior - by listening to how it'rings' when it is hit by meteorites or its interior rumbles. They hope the research could reveal more about how the rocky planets in our solar system formed, and reveal whether life is hiding beneath the surface. Nasa's InSight mission was due to launch earlier this year but was delayed after a leak was detected.

The race between Alphabet Inc. and Amazon to unleash the first fleet of delivery drones is now neck and neck. The White House has given Alphabet Inc.'s delivery drone service the greenlight to start testing its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) at a US site. This initiative is part of The White House's project to understand this technology and what safety measures need to be implemented before unleashing flocks into the open skies. The race between Alphabet Inc. and Amazon to unleash the first fleet of delivery drones is now neck and neck. The White House has given Alphabet Inc.'s delivery drone (pictured) service the greenlight to start testing its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) at a US site Alphabet Inc. first unveiled its secret two-year drone delivery project in 2014.

A Florida-based company has won U.S. government permission to send a robotic lander to the moon next year. The move is the first time the United States has cleared a private space mission to fly beyond Earth's orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration's unprecedented go-ahead for the Moon Express mission also sets a legal and regulatory framework for a host of other commercial expeditions to the moon, asteroids and Mars. The Florida-based company Moon Express, which is partnering with Nasa, hopes to send scientific payloads to the Moon, in the hopes to eventually provide commercial services. Artist's impression of Moon Express lander on surface of the moon pictured The moon is a'treasure chest' of lucrative materials.

The federal government is planning to lift a moratorium on funding of controversial experiments that use human stem cells to create animal embryos that are partly human. The National Institutes of Health has unveiled a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make the embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions. The NIH imposed a moratorium on funding these experiments in September because they could raise ethical concerns. Scientists have started to grow human organs inside pigs, in an attempt to solve the worldwide shortage for transplants. Researchers are interested in growing human tissues and organs in animals by introducing pluripotent human cells into early animal embryos.

A software program dubbed'Mayhem' was poised to win the final round of a three-year contest to teach computers to launch and defend against cyber attacks, earning a 2 million prize for the team that wrote the winning code. The event, known as the Cyber Grand Challenge, concluded Thursday evening in a Las Vegas convention centre ballroom after a digital battle among software programs running on seven supercomputers on a stage in a Las Vegas ballroom. Thousands watched as announcers presented a play-by-play account of the competition. The event, known as the Cyber Grand Challenge, concluded Thursday evening in a Las Vegas convention centre ballroom after a digital battle among software programs. For almost 10 hours, competitors played the classic cybersecurity exercise of Capture the Flag in a specially created computer testbed laden with an array of bugs hidden inside custom, never-before-analyzed software.

A tiny remote-controlled aircraft modelled on an insect will become Britain's latest weapon against terror. The Dragonfly drone – which can fit in the palm of a hand - will spy on enemy positions and gather intelligence for the military and British agents. It is inspired by the biology of a dragonfly, with four flapping wings and four legs to enable it to fly through the air seamlessly and perch on a windowsill to spy on terrorists. The gadget could even fly into heavily guarded rooms full of jihadists and provide soldiers on the battlefield a picture of what is going on. It is one of the futuristic pieces of kit currently being developed for the Ministry of Defence and the UK's security forces as part of the MoD's new innovation project.

These are some of the government's sanitized terms for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that the CIA used on captives held at secret locations overseas during the George W. Bush administration. They mask the brutality that many prisoners faced for months or years under the agency's interrogation program, as outlined in the landmark 2014 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. That report is dense and riddled with redactions, but its findings have never been more relevant. Although President Obama signed an executive order ending "enhanced interrogation" two days after taking office in 2009, torture could easily find its way back on the table: Donald Trump has repeatedly endorsed waterboarding, which he's called "minimal, minimal, minimal torture," and has said he's prepared to do "much worse." What if there were a way to make sense of state-sanctioned torture in a more visceral way than by reading a news article or watching a documentary?