TROISDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's Deutsche Post is testing robots that could help postal workers cope with increasing numbers of parcels on their delivery rounds, a company manager said on Thursday. The volume of parcels being delivered by Deutsche Post in Germany is rising steadily as more and more Germans buy goods online from retailers such as Amazon.com That is making up for declining letter volumes, but posing problems due to the larger size of items involved. "Robots could be used in deliveries in three to five years' time," Clemens Beckmann, head of innovation at the group's parcel and letter division, said in an interview with Reuters. The robots, which look like a table on wheels on which goods can be placed, would follow delivery workers, helping them to transport and carry heavy parcels. If the postie stops walking, the robot stops too, and it only starts again when they move on.

If its first quarter is anything to go by, 2016 may be shaping up historically as the 1491 of space discovery. The month preceding Valentine's Day alone provided what would once have been a year's worth of cosmic news. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took one giant leap toward a new Age of Discovery by relaunching and landing a rocket that had already made a round-trip journey through the stratosphere – a revolutionary moment in private space exploration. A pair of researchers kicked off a frenzied planet hunt by demonstrating that a massive, heretofore undetected planet could be lurking on the outer edge of our solar system. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested that unforeseen effects of rapid scientific progress might, paradoxically, cause the extinction of life on Earth in the next thousand years or so, adding, "By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." And scientists announced they'd detected gravitational waves, evidence of a billion-year-old collision between black holes, thus confirming the final and most obscure principle of Einstein's theory of relativity – and opening a window that may soon offer a glimpse of the universe's very creation.

If we grant that a strategy of mass on mass and robotic attrition is either unsustainable or unfruitful (because who cares about dysfunctional or nonfunctioning robots?), then we must meet this with a counter response. And that counter is greater strategic surprise, maneuver, and deception. Except, the only way for us to truly "offset" among the robot carnage is through better sensors and stronger artificial intelligence. Stronger A.I., or at least the pursuit of stronger A.I., by nation states is a very dangerous and unstable situation for the international community. As I have written before, A.I. has the potential for massive benefits to society, if it is pursued responsibly.

The latest in the drumbeat of news about artificial intelligence advances came from Seoul, where machine learning algorithms recently beat the world champion in a game of "Go." A Scientific American article explains why this is so impressive, but the implications run far deeper than a match of wits between man and machine. Soon, our workplaces will be transformed by artificial intelligence, with a wide range of processes and roles becoming redefined as some of the tasks comprising them are taken over by machines. Travelers are seeing early signs of this phenomenon. For example, in many US airports these days, instead of standing in a long line to have an immigration officer eyeball us, we scan our passport at a self-service kiosk, answer a few questions, get photographed, and then hand our photo receipt and passport to an agent who quickly verifies that everything checks out.

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

They're even better than the actual expendable sonar systems, because they're not constrained by battery life: the drone's rotors are covered in solar cells and can generate power after a little time under the sun. In addition, it can hunt for subs in flocks in case the Navy wants to scour a big area more quickly. Jones told the publication that as a sonobuoy replacement, the drone "[will] be on the water 23 hours a day, and flying maybe one hour a day." It was designed as a "launch and forget" system with a water-tight enclosure, though, so we're guessing it's tough enough to endure the ocean's harsh conditions. Speaking of drones that can take off from water, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory created a similar machine called CRACUNS.

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

One of the most frustrating elements of the current healthcare environment is the administrative burden of prior authorizations for medications and procedures. It is a frustration for providers, for patients, and for payers. Is there any way to solve this dilemma? For physicians, an estimated 20 hours per week is spent in prior authorization activities, costing an average of 83,000 in excess annual overhead per physician. Is there an actual benefit for this effort? Most physicians say that payers (commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)) use prior authorizations to keep costs down.

The safety of troops in the very near future will rely on Artificial Intelligence-assisted tablets and small screens, networked to drones in the air that feed data back down to ground personnel equipped with information-rich HUD visors. "Robots are going to help humans in dangerous situations contain and control a region," said Dave Bossert, DARPA Program Manager and Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. "Maintaining advantage, communicating, and understanding an area is as good as or better than being aggressive." In a recent interview Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work expanded on the idea of how AI will power robots in hazardous situations. The networked soldier, Bossert said, will rely heavily on custom-built Android tablets and several wearable devices.

Population migration is valuable information which leads to proper decision in urban-planning strategy, massive investment, and many other fields. For instance, inter-city migration is a posterior evidence to see if the government's constrain of population works, and inter-community immigration might be a prior evidence of real estate price hike. With timely data, it is also impossible to compare which city is more favorable for the people, suppose the cities release different new regulations, we could also compare the customers of different real estate development groups, where they come from, where they probably will go. Unfortunately these data was not available. In this paper, leveraging the data generated by positioning team in Didi, we propose a novel approach that timely monitoring population migration from community scale to provincial scale. Migration can be detected as soon as in a week. It could be faster, the setting of a week is for statistical purpose. A monitoring system is developed, then applied nation wide in China, some observations derived from the system will be presented in this paper. This new method of migration perception is origin from the insight that nowadays people mostly moving with their personal Access Point (AP), also known as WiFi hotspot. Assume that the ratio of AP moving to the migration of population is constant, analysis of comparative population migration would be feasible. More exact quantitative research would also be done with few sample research and model regression. The procedures of processing data includes many steps: eliminating the impact of pseudo-migration AP, for instance pocket WiFi, and second-hand traded router; distinguishing moving of population with moving of companies; identifying shifting of AP by the finger print clusters, etc..