Stocks lost further ground on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday, weighed down by the yen's ascent. The 225-issue Nikkei average fell 65.71 points, or 0.34 percent, to close at 19,455.88. On Friday, the key market gauge gave up 68.55 points. The Tokyo market was closed on Monday for a national holiday. The Topix index of all first-section issues ended down 2.43 points, or 0.16 percent, at 1,563.42, after shedding 6.84 points on Friday.

Gabrielle Douglas of the United States of America competes on the balance beam in the Artistic Gymnastics Women's Team final in the London 2012 Olympic Games. Steve Penny resigned as USA Gymnastics president last Thursday, following accusations of negligence in the sport's yearslong sexual assault scandal. Our eyes turned abroad last week, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited South Korea and said "the policy of strategic patience has ended" for its neighbors to the north; the White House said it wouldn't repeat false claims that a British electronic intelligence agency helped with alleged (unproven) wiretapping of Trump Tower; and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, delayed by the snow, finally made her first visit to President Donald Trump, complete with an awkward handshake that wasn't. At home, a Hawaii judge also said "not so fast" to Trump's revised travel ban that for the second time looked to restrict which people can enter the country. Here are five stories -- that have nothing to do with Trump, Tillerson or The Spokesperson In Chief -- you might have missed in all of the globetrotting.

Embattled Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is the "heart and soul" of the ride-hailing giant and should not step down, Uber board member and Thrive Capital founder Arianna Huffington said Monday. "You cannot judge people by their worst moments, (Kalanick) is changing, he's evolving," she told CNN, adding that "we would not be where we are without Travis," a reference to how the company took on taxi associations and city lawmakers to push its disruptive tech. Huffington also is involved in an ongoing investigation into accusations by former engineer Susan Fowler that Uber's environment is a toxic workplace for women. Former U.S. attorney general and Uber advisor Eric Holder is leading that investigation, which should conclude by the end of April, Huffington said. Beyond the internal probe into the company's frat-like culture, Uber also is contending with a lawsuit from Google-owned Waymo over alleged theft of proprietary self-driving car sensor technology.

After weeks of scandals Kalanick wrote of hiring Jones Despite Jones' best efforts, the public perception of Uber has deteriorated in the past few weeks controversy and boycotts Video provided by TheStreet Newslook SAN FRANCISCO -- Embattled Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is the "heart and soul" of the ride-hailing giant and should not step down, Uber board member and Thrive Capital founder Arianna Huffington said Monday. "You cannot judge people by their worst moments, (Kalanick) is changing, he's evolving," she told CNN, adding that "we would not be where we are without Travis," a reference to how the company took on taxi associations and city lawmakers to push its disruptive tech. Huffington also is involved in an ongoing investigation into accusations by former engineer Susan Fowler that Uber's environment is a toxic workplace for women. Former U.S. attorney general and Uber advisor Eric Holder is leading that investigation, which should conclude by the end of April, Huffington said. Beyond the internal probe into the company's frat-like culture, Uber also is contending with a lawsuit from Google-owned Waymo over alleged theft of proprietary self-driving car sensor technology.

Information in neural networks is represented as weighted connections, or synapses, between neurons. This poses a problem as the primary computational bottleneck for neural networks is the vector-matrix multiply when inputs are multiplied by the neural network weights. Conventional processing architectures are not well suited for simulating neural networks, often requiring large amounts of energy and time. Additionally, synapses in biological neural networks are not binary connections, but exhibit a nonlinear response function as neurotransmitters are emitted and diffuse between neurons. Inspired by neuroscience principles, we present a digital neuromorphic architecture, the Spiking Temporal Processing Unit (STPU), capable of modeling arbitrary complex synaptic response functions without requiring additional hardware components. We consider the paradigm of spiking neurons with temporally coded information as opposed to non-spiking rate coded neurons used in most neural networks. In this paradigm we examine liquid state machines applied to speech recognition and show how a liquid state machine with temporal dynamics maps onto the STPU-demonstrating the flexibility and efficiency of the STPU for instantiating neural algorithms.

March 20, 2017 --In the age of same-day delivery, the International Space Station sent a package 249 miles down to Earth on Sunday in less than six hours. There was, however, one sizable difference between it and the cardboard box sitting on your front doorstep. The SpaceX capsule that splashed into the waters off California carried more than 5,000 pounds of completed science experiments and used equipment. The astronauts' release of the capsule down to Earth further shows the relationship between SpaceX and NASA to support life and science aboard the International Space Station. The private company has become a lifeline to the six astronauts living aboard the ISS, bringing them food, equipment, and experiments, and returning some of those materials to Earth.

Germany plans to use voice recognition software to verify the many asylum applications it receives -- but the technology is far from perfect, experts warn. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), around 60 percent of people who sought asylum in the country in 2016 didn't have identification papers with them. Now, German authorities are planning to use new voice recognition software to verify the asylum seekers' country of origin, according to a report on Die Welt. The test, which will begin in two weeks and roll out widely in 2018, aims at analysing and identifying the dialects of people seeking asylum using recorded speech samples. The software is based on the same voice authentication technology used by banks and insurance companies and would help officers review the applications' sources of origin.

The African smartphone market is gaining rapid traction. According to predictions, smartphones sold this year will outnumber feature phone sales, and mobile penetration is far higher than line-based internet access. Currently, most people in Africa use text messages to send money with a service called M-Pesa from the largest tech start-up in Kenya. Now, chatbots could potentially replace text-based transactions altogether. Budapest-based Hungarian start-up UXstudio has created a chatbot called Nuru.

SpaceX has identified several sites on Mars that could one day support human settlement. The firm is working with NASA to pinpoint the possible landing sites for its Red Dragon spacecraft – the precursor to its proposed'interplanetary transport system' – and for future manned missions. At a presentation in Texas this weekend, Paul Wooster of SpaceX revealed one site in particular appears to be a'promising' candidate, with a flat terrain and access to ice. The firm is working with NASA to pinpoint the possible landing sites for its Red Dragon spacecraft – the precursor to its proposed'interplanetary transport system' – and for future manned missions The Dragon 2 capsule is designed to land on any surface in the solar system, SpaceX says. It uses jets to land itself, the same system SpaceX is developing for its booster rockets.

The soon to be released Albert Einstein Robot from Hanson Robotics is displayed at their booth during the 2017 Consumer Electronic Show ( FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images) Many younger people only know of Albert Einstein through t-shirts with his wacky hair and tongue sticking out, or through one-off events that center around his intellectual achievements, like last year's celebration for the 100th anniversary of his General Theory of Relativity. Yet Einstein is more than just an eccentric genius. "Everyone knows Einstein is a great scientist," says Hebrew University's Professor Hanoch Gutfreund. "He also is an humanitarian who expressed his views in his writing, teaching, and public appearances. While not everyone may be a certifiable genius, there are several leadership tips that Millennials can borrow from Einstein in order to succeed at work and in life. "Einstein is a symbol of innovation, tenacity, and imagination," says Elan Divon, co-founder of Einstein Legacy Project (ELP), under the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University; an affiliate organization of The Hebrew University which was founded by Einstein in 1918 and to whom Einstein bequeathed his estate upon his passing in 1955. "We want to use his legacy to inspire minds all over the planet and empower a new generation of Einstein's.