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

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

When the draft version of a federal encryption bill got leaked this month, the verdict in the tech community was unanimous. Critics called it ludicrous and technically illiterate--and these were the kinder assessments of the "Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016," proposed legislation authored by the offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr. The encryption issue is complex and the stakes are high, as evidenced by the recent battle between Apple and the FBI. Many other technology issues that the country is grappling with these days are just as complex, controversial, and critical--witness the debates over law enforcement's use of stingrays to track mobile phones or the growing concerns around drones, self-driving cars, and 3-D printing. Yet decisions about these technical issues are being handled by luddite lawmakers who sometimes boast about not owning a cell phone or never having sent an email.

Infrared cameras that track eye movements could detect concussions in less than a minute, offering insight into whether athletes or children have sustained the injury. The device, called'Eye-Sync' has now been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and has been developed amid growing concerns over brain injuries in contact sports. Head trauma affects the brain's anticipatory neural network and Eye-Sync focuses on analysing visual response in this network. Infrared cameras that track eye movements could detect concussions in less than a minute, offering insight into whether athletes or children have sustained the injury. The device, called'Eye-Sync' (pictured) has now been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration The device was developed by Boston-based SyncThink. A user puts on a virtual reality headset connected to a computer tablet, with a moving circle appearing in the display.

The consumer drones that opened the skies to the public may one day be giving a bird's eye view to Chinese authorities. Chinese drone maker DJI -- the world's largest maker of small drones -- said it was in talks with Chinese officials who want access to the data collected by its products, Bloomberg reports. That data could include flight records, GPS information and even video. Whether this applied to Chinese customers only, or customers in Europe and the U.S., has not been made fully clear. "Should DJI receive a valid legal request from a government agency," spokesperson Oliver Wang said in a statement to media, "we may provide user information to that agency, just as other companies do. That is the case in the U.S., China or anywhere in the world."

In the ongoing battle against cyber attacks, a man-machine collaboration could offer a new path to security. To keep up with cyber threats, the cybersecurity industry has turned to assistance from unsupervised artificial intelligence systems that operate independently from human analysts. But the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., in partnership with the machine-learning startup PatternEx, is offering a fresh approach. Their new program, AI2, draws on what humans and machines each do best: It allows human analysts to build upon the large scale pattern recognition and learning capabilities of artificial intelligence. The industry standard right now is unsupervised machine learning, CSAIL research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni, who helped develop the program, says in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor.

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN – Drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising, previously unreported U.S. Air Force data show, underlining how reliant the military has become on unmanned aircraft. The trend may give clues to the U.S. military's strategy as it considers withdrawing more troops from the country, while at the same time shoring up local forces who have struggled to stem a worsening Taliban insurgency. U.S. President Barack Obama said in 2013 that the Afghan drawdown after 2014 and progress against al-Qaida would "reduce the need for unmanned strikes," amid concerns from human rights groups and some foreign governments over civilian casualties. On one level, that has played out; the number of missiles and bombs dropped by drones in Afghanistan actually fell last year, largely because the U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014 and is now a fraction of the size. Yet as the force has shrunk, it has leaned on unmanned aircraft more than ever, the air force data reveal, with drone strikes accounting for at least 61 percent of weapons deployed in the first quarter of this year.

TAIPEI – A Taiwan artist has refused to see the big picture and instead captured the likeness of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, to celebrate her inauguration next month, on a single grain of rice. Chen Forng-Shean, who has also sculpted the face of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong on rice, said the staple was a fitting medium for his work because it met the basic needs of ethnic Chinese. "Rice gives nourishment to the proverbial belly of the ethnic Chinese people. I used rice (as a medium) to encourage Taiwan's leader, Tsai Ing-wen, hoping that she can take care of the common people, so they don't need to endure hunger, and improve their financial situation," he said. He outlined the facial features and accompanying Chinese characters with a needle-point pen onto the surface before carving and then dabbing black paint into the grooves. It took three months and more than 10 tries to get the sculpture to Chen's satisfaction.

Norwegian authorities have violated mass killer Anders Behring Breivik's human rights by holding him in solitary confinement in a three-cell complex where he can play video games, watch TV and exercise, a court in Oslo ruled Wednesday. In a written decision, the Oslo district court said Breivik's solitary confinement for killing 77 people in 2011 bomb-and-gun massacres breached the European Convention on Human Rights' ban on inhuman treatment. "The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society," the court said. "This applies no matter what -- also in the treatment of terrorists and killers." The court ordered the government to pay Breivik's legal costs of 331,000 kroner, about 41,000.

A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing need to identify and eliminate "influence bots" - realistic, automated identities that illicitly shape discussion on sites like Twitter and Facebook - before they get too influential. Spurred by such events, DARPA held a 4-week competition in February/March 2015 in which multiple teams supported by the DARPA Social Media in Strategic Communications program competed to identify a set of previously identified "influence bots" serving as ground truth on a specific topic within Twitter. Past work regarding influence bots often has difficulty supporting claims about accuracy, since there is limited ground truth (though some exceptions do exist [3,7]). However, with the exception of [3], no past work has looked specifically at identifying influence bots on a specific topic. This paper describes the DARPA Challenge and describes the methods used by the three top-ranked teams.