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

The foreign affairs adviser to Pakistan's prime minister says "all indicators" confirm that Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the country's southwest while travelling under a false name with a fake Pakistani identity document.

A lot of tech-smart people think artificial intelligence (AI) might pose a threat to the existence of humankind. Others think it's not something to worry about, or not for a very long time, if ever. Operating on the reasonable assumption that what happens tomorrow depends on what we do today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is holding public workshops in four cities to look at the state of AI and to look ahead at potential benefits and problems. What I heard is that what happens with AI is about us -- how we design it, manage it and use it. We have to be accountable.

WASHINGTON – The government is squandering its technology budget maintaining museum-ready computer systems in critical areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. In a report released Wednesday, nonpartisan congressional investigators found that about three-fourths of the 80 billion budget goes to keep aging technology running, and the increasing cost is shortchanging modernization. The White House has been pushing to replace workhorse systems that date back more than 50 years in some cases. But the government is expected to spend 7 billion less on modernization in 2017 than in 2010, said the Government Accountability Office. "Clearly, there are billions wasted," GAO information technology expert David Powner told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a hearing.

A Foxconn factory's workforce today shrunk from 110,000 employees down to 50,000, according to a report from the South China Morning Post. Because robots can do the same job. Foxconn is Apple's primary manufacturing partner, and there is a fear that other factories in the Chinese city of Kunshan will do the same thing, something that could have a disastrous impact on the population of the area, which is largely made up of migrant workers. In fact, according to the report as many as 600 companies in the area have plans to rely more on automation. Related: A fire broke out at Foxconn's main iPhone plant, but there's no cause for concern Foxconn has been working toward replacing workers with robots for a while now, obviously in an attempt to save money and increase profits.

Artificial Intelligence had already taken over defense targeting decisions on Aegis missile warships of the US Navy, according to US military officials. "Advances in AI will lead us to a new era of human-machine cooperation and combat teaming where tactical acuity of a computer will help man make more informed decisions," Harris stated. The United States would never allow AI systems to have the power to fire nuclear missiles in any offensive capacity, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work told a conference at the Atlantic Council on March 4. But Work also warned that the US armed forces could not allow other countries to develop Artificial Intelligence with that offensive capability without matching them.

The US nuclear weapons force still uses a 1970s-era computer system and floppy disks, a government report has revealed. The Government Accountability Office said the Pentagon was one of several departments where "legacy systems" urgently needed to be replaced. The report said taxpayers spent 61bn ( 41bn) a year on maintaining ageing technologies. It said that was three times more than the investment on modern IT systems. The report said that the Department of Defence systems that co-ordinated intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft "runs on an IBM Series-1 Computer - a 1970s computing system - and uses eight-inch floppy disks".

Artificial intelligence has made gigantic leaps in the past few years. Thanks to the advent of technologies like multicore processors, machine learning and neural networking, A.I. is able to mimic known human brain functions more closely than ever before. Facebook's A.I. can recognize a human face and decide who it belongs to. Google's A.I. can beat a world champion at an incredibly complex board game that's been around for centuries. Amazon's A.I. can figure out what products you may want for your home and help you manage your IoT devices.

We learn the structure of a Markov Network between two groups of random variables from joint observations. Since modelling and learning the full MN structure may be hard, learning the links between two groups directly may be a preferable option. We introduce a novel concept called the \emph{partitioned ratio} whose factorization directly associates with the Markovian properties of random variables across two groups. A simple one-shot convex optimization procedure is proposed for learning the \emph{sparse} factorizations of the partitioned ratio and it is theoretically guaranteed to recover the correct inter-group structure under mild conditions. The performance of the proposed method is experimentally compared with the state of the art MN structure learning methods using ROC curves. Real applications on analyzing bipartisanship in US congress and pairwise DNA/time-series alignments are also reported.

Performance of nuclear threat detection systems based on gamma-ray spectrometry often strongly depends on the ability to identify the part of measured signal that can be attributed to background radiation. We have successfully applied a method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain a compact null-space model of background spectra using PCA projection residuals to derive a source detection score. We have shown the method's utility in a threat detection system using mobile spectrometers in urban scenes (Tandon et al 2012). While it is commonly assumed that measured photon counts follow a Poisson process, standard PCA makes a Gaussian assumption about the data distribution, which may be a poor approximation when photon counts are low. This paper studies whether and in what conditions PCA with a Poisson-based loss function (Poisson PCA) can outperform standard Gaussian PCA in modeling background radiation to enable more sensitive and specific nuclear threat detection.