W. Brent Garry sets up his laser scanner to complete the first 3-D map of Indian Tunnel, a lava tube in Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. When humans at last reach the surface of Mars, one of the first things they may need to do is dive beneath it. That's why a team of NASA researchers gathered in August at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho: The intrepid explorers created the first complete three-dimensional scan of Indian Tunnel, one of the largest and most accessible lava tubes at the monument. Researchers are mapping lava tubes at the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho in hopes that their findings might help the explorers use lava tubes on the red planet for shelter. Their work not only helps us better understand our planet's geologic past, but it will also allow scientists to learn more about potential subterranean living on other worlds.

Cybersecurity was all over the news in 2016 – whether it was email breaches that compromised the Democrat campaign for the elections, or revelations towards the end of the year that planes were vulnerable to hacking through in-flight entertainment systems. The British government boasted that it had the capabilities to launch cybersecurity offensives and was committing a huge chunk of its budget to developing these further. Yahoo suffered from an attack that potentially gained access to 1 billion accounts, the largest known breach of all time. Vendors, hackers, banks, businesses, countries and shadowy state actors all seem locked in a perpetual game of cat and mouse – and highly sophisticated and organised malicious attackers seem to have the upper hand. According to the experts, here are some of the cybersecurity nightmares organisations will have to wrangle with in 2017.

No statistical algorithm can be the master of all machine learning application domains. That's because the domain knowledge encoded in that algorithm is specific to the analytical challenge for which it was constructed. If you try to apply that same algorithm to a data source that differs in some way, large or small, from the original domain's training data, its predictive power may fall flat. That said, a new application domain may have so much in common with prior applications that data scientists can't be blamed for trying to reuse hard-won knowledge from prior models. This is a well-established but fast-evolving frontier of data science known as "transfer learning" (but goes by other names such as knowledge transfer, inductive transfer, and meta learning).

Maroon 5 keeps popping up on my Pandora stations, so artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning still have a ways to go. Even if AI can beat us at Go. But, wow, that aside, the technologies showcased at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (#CES2017, actually the 50th annual, sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association [CTA]), from countless robots to Hyundai exoskeletons, are incredible. Voice recognition, virtual and augmented reality, smart home technologies and drones are everywhere. AI and machine learning comprise major threads. Which raises the question: Will all that AI be Democrat or Republican?

A scarf designed to filter out harmful elements in city air. A breast pump that fits into a bra and keeps track of pumping volume. A drone that can dive into water and help anglers catch a big one. CES 2017, the consumer tech event held in Las Vegas this week, featured vendors with automated baubles, humanoid robots and "smart" everything -- a dishwasher, hairbrush and lawnmower, to name a few. But it's not so much the gadgets as their underlying technology that will make CIOs -- who seek out new tools for business, not the home or yard -- stop, look and listen.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon may soon be unleashing a 21st-century version of locusts on its adversaries after officials on Monday said it had successfully tested a swarm of 103 micro-drones. The important step in the development of new autonomous weapon systems was made possible by improvements in artificial intelligence, holding open the possibility that groups of small robots could act together under human direction. Military strategists have high hopes for such drone swarms that would be cheap to produce and able to overwhelm opponents' defenses with their great numbers. The test of the world's largest micro-drone swarm in California in October included 103 Perdix micro-drones measuring around six inches (16 centimeters) launched from three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets, the Pentagon said in a statement. "The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying and self-healing," it said.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon may soon be unleashing a 21st-century version of locusts on its adversaries after officials on Monday said it had successfully tested a swarm of 103 micro-drones. The important step in the development of new autonomous weapon systems was made possible by improvements in artificial intelligence, holding open the possibility that groups of small robots could act together under human direction. Military strategists have high hopes for such drone swarms that would be cheap to produce and able to overwhelm opponents' defenses with their great numbers. The test of the world's largest micro-drone swarm in California in October included 103 Perdix micro-drones measuring around six inches (16 cm) launched from three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets, the Pentagon said in a statement. "The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying and self-healing," it said.

IBM was awarded the most patents in the US in 2016. IBM's efforts to match and surpass the human brain with computing technology helped push the company to the top of the 2016 list of patent awards. The US Patent and Trademark Office granted IBM 8,088 patents for the year, more than 2,700 of them stemming from artificial intelligence and cognitive computing work, IBM and IFI Claims said Monday. Next on the list was Samsung with 5,518 patents, Canon with 3,665, Qualcomm with 2,897 and Google with 2,835. In total, the USPTO granted 304,126 patents in 2016, 10 percent more than the year before, IFI Claims said.

The Government passed an "assault on freedom" while people were afraid and distracted, according to campaigners. Campaign group Liberty is requesting a High Court judicial review of the wide-ranging new spying tactics in the Investigatory Powers Act. That law was passed at the end of last year and gives spies – and a range of other organisations including the Food Standards Agency – the power to see anyone's entire internet history, alongside other unprecedented rules. The Liberty challenge will focus on bulk powers, which let intelligence agencies collect up huge amount of data in case it needs to be used in future, meaning that people not under investigation have their information watched. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Amazon made an acquisition last year without getting it publicized. The electronic commerce giant did not spill the beans about the deal, but somehow some details managed to surface this Monday after the company showed off Alexa's growth and expansion at CES 2017 last week. According to multiple sources, the Seattle-headquartered company bought San Diego-based cybersecurity startup Harvest.ai in early 2016. The acquisition was made stealthily, so it wasn't made known until recently when investors and tipsters have come out to gush about the deal. If Harvest.ai investor Fred Wang is to be asked, the acquisition was made so Amazon could bolster cloud security for its patrons.