With the general availability of the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us. We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than a processor since it includes high bandwidth memory and fabric interconnect adapters on a single package – is what the future looks like. And that goes for Knights family processors and co-processors as well as the "Pascal" and "Volta" accelerators made by Nvidia, the Sparc64-XIfx and ARM chips that will be used in the used in the Post-K system in Japan made by Fujitsu, the Matrix2000 DSP accelerator being created by China for one of its pre-exascale systems, or the CPU-GPU hybrids based on its "Zen" Opterons that AMD is cooking up for supercomputing systems in the United States and, with licensing partners, in China. During the recent ISC16 supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel gathered up the executives in charge of some of the largest supercomputing facilities on the planet who are also – not coincidentally, but absolutely intentionally – also early adopters of the Knights Landing Xeon Phi and, in some cases, the Omni-Path interconnect that is a kicker to Intel's True Scale InfiniBand networking.

U.S. officials covered up the Chinese government's attempt to hack computers used by the nation's banking regulator, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday. The report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology alleges that the Chinese government was spying on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which stores confidential data on the nation's largest financial institutions, over a three-year period starting in 2010. "Even the former chairwoman's computer had been hacked by a foreign government, likely the Chinese," the report claims. The intruders were reportedly seeking "economic intelligence," Reuters reported. FDIC officials allegedly tried to cover up the hack to protect the regulator's incoming chairman.

The story first turned up in mid-May: Foxconn, Apple's favorite manufacturer, was replacing 60,000 of its workers with robots. Everyone from the BBC to Apple fan sites soon reported the ground-shifting news. There was just one problem: It was mostly false. Last weekend, a Foxconn spokesperson told Chinese media that the company hadn't laid off anyone, much less replaced them with automation. That part of the story came from overly enthusiastic bureaucrats in Kunshan, a manufacturing town keen to promote itself as a hub for innovation. The incident seemed like an apt metaphor.

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

In this Dec. 17, 2014 file photo, a Pakistan army soldier inspects the Army Public School that was attacked a day before by Taliban gunmen, in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Pakistani army said Wednesday, July 13, 2016 that the mastermind of the 2014 attack on an army-run school has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. A Pakistani military spokesman says that a U.S. Army general confirmed the death of Taliban leader Khalifa Umar Mansoor in a phone call to Pakistan's army chief.

Last week New York University hosted the final workshop of a series sponsored by the White House on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than focusing on the technical bits and bytes, the NYU-hosted schedule centered around the near-term social and economic impact of automation, mass data collection and new analytics. This leads directly into the White House's July 22nd deadline for its Request for Information on "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." While we often fantasize about the fallout from the coming robot apocalypse, that is simply not today's challenge. Today, we need to focus on the near-term impact of smart-er automation systems on labor and social structures.

Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Gene Lee (seated) is operating a simulator developed by Nick Ernest (standing left) for military training and research. Ernest, a University of Cincinnati graduate and Psibernetix president and CEO, is standing next to David Carroll of Psibernetix. Gene Lee has decades of experience as a fighter pilot and aerial combat instructor. The talent Lee, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, has as a pilot allowed him to easily and consistently defeat other computer programs used in research and training. That was until he began working with a system developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

There is a need for a new global platform to monitor, consider, and make recommendations about the implications of emerging technologies in general, and AI more specifically, for international security. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish – like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies – it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then – don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?

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

American law firm BakerHostetler has hired ROSS, a robot lawyer, to assist in bankruptcy cases. ROSS, who is powered by IBM's Watson technology, will serve as a legal researcher for the firm. Legal researcher jobs are typically filled by fresh law school graduates embarking upon their careers. "ROSS surfaces relevant passages of law and then allows lawyers to interact with them. Lawyers can either enforce ROSS's hypothesis or get it to question its hypothesis," Andrew Arruda, chief executive of ROSS Intelligence, told The Washington Post.