You're so hard to explore. Sometimes you bombard spacecrafts with hurtling rocks and deadly cosmic rays, and other times you're so empty you don't give astronauts a darn thing to hold on to. But while scientists haven't quite figured out how to keep radiation at bay, the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory--specifically, its Planetary Robotics Laboratory--are building machines that can get a grip on the most difficult surfaces astronauts will find out there. Adhesion-wise, space presents a couple problems. First, robots typically struggle with uneven surfaces, let alone the kind of cliffs and crags you see on Mars.

The Partnership on AI consolidates control for a handful of corporations and their stakeholders, pitting them against Elon Musk's OpenAI open source, non-profit that is available to everyone. Both the Partnership on AI and Elon Musk's OpenAI were established to advance humanity through Artificial Intelligence. While Musk's OpenAI was devised to be open and available to the public, the Partnership on AI is more of a consolidation of power that benefits stakeholders whose findings will later be used to enact public policies. Google/DeepMind, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon have collaborated to form the Partnership on AI to "formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field." While third-party groups such as academics, non-profits, and policy specialists have been invited to be on the new Board of Directors, the Partnership on AI ultimately serves the private stakeholders, and whatever the stakeholders dictate will be relayed to the public.

Five of the world's largest technology companies have come together to shed light on the ongoing development of artificial intelligence. The entities involved are Facebook, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and the group's new nonprofit organization will grow to include a number of AI research groups and academics. Announced today, the coalition will be known as the Partnership on AI and it will be co-chaired by Microsoft Research chief Eric Horvitz and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Apple is in talks with the group, but has not yet decided to join the organization. The partnership has two main focuses.

International Business Machines Corp. plans to purchase consultancy Promontory Financial Group LLC., the two companies said Thursday, creating a new subsidiary dubbed'Watson Financial Services.' The companies didn't disclose financial details of the deal, which they said is subject to regulatory approvals. The idea, they said, is to combine Promontory's financial regulatory expertise with Watson, IBM IBM 0.61 % 's artificial intelligence computer system, to help banks meet ever-rising regulatory expectations in areas such as anti-money-laundering detection systems, consumer complaint databases, and so-called stress tests. Financial regulatory requirements are "rapidly outstripping the capacity of humans to keep up," a joint press release from the companies said. Privately held Promontory was founded in 2001 by Eugene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, and has hired a small army of former regulators and government officials to advise financial firms.

Clarissa may have been the one to explain it all back in the 1990s but actress Melissa Joan Hart has been explaining plenty herself during a recent string of interviews. Hart, who played a precocious teen girl in Nickelodeon's "Clarissa Explains it All" and a precocious teen witch in ABC and the WB's "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," made headlines recently when she told People that she not only was supporting Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, but she was working as the campaign's Connecticut chairwoman. The actress has been making publicity appearances for the 20th anniversary of "Sabrina," which debuted Sept. 27, 1996, but the juiciest tidbit from Hart's latest spate of interviews isn't about "Sabrina" but about "Clarissa." When asked by Us Weekly about the possibility of a reboot of either series, Hart waved off the thought of returning to her teenage witchy ways. But when it came to "Clarissa," Hart said, "There is some talk about'Clarissa,' so we'll see which way that goes."

Despite escalating industry pressure for approval of package-delivery drones, safety experts and federal documents indicate widespread flights aren't likely before the next decade. U.S. aviation authorities only recently kicked off the formal, time-consuming process of defining the types of collision-avoidance systems considered essential for such operations to receive broad regulatory authorization. Drafting the technical standards is projected to take three or four years, envisioning a suite of ground-based and airborne sensors that haven't yet been developed. Even strong proponents of unmanned aerial vehicles predict that delivering packages to individual customers probably won't gain significant momentum until at least roughly 2020. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of the decade, we could see more routine uses" of package-delivery drones, according to Paul McDuffee, co-chair of the federal standards-setting panel and a high-ranking official with Boeing Co. BA -0.13 % 's drone-making unit, Insitu Inc.

Machine learning and AI could be the key to protecting enterprise IT from advancing cybersecurity threats, Cylance CEO Stuart McClure said on Tuesday. McClure's company, which bills itself as "advanced threat protection for the endpoint," uses machine learning to analyze massive amounts of data in an organization and classifies that data automatically. Cylance, in offering breach protection, is often confused with legacy anti-virus software, McClure said. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) eventually brought Cylance in to help them work on the early days of what would eventually be determined to be a massive breach.

Antivirus software ain't what it used to be. The sneaky, sophisticated security threats your PC faces now have gone far beyond what traditional software can do. The future of protecting your PC will require a multi-pronged approach involving vigilant updates, bug bounties, and artificial intelligence. Like any software, antivirus is susceptible to bugs. Earlier this summer, Google's Project Zero discovered serious flaws in enterprise and consumer products from Symantec that allowed malicious actors to take control of a computer.

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

For now, robots controlling and informing other robots about what's happening doesn't necessarily lead to action, but in the future it won't be hard to imagine an entirely unmanned vanguard scouting for a fleet or patrolling a slice of ocean and reporting back only the most relevant information to the humans in charge. None of the robots in this exercise were armed, their payloads instead contained sensors and cameras. And for the most part, we can expect unmanned vehicles at sea to primarily be scouts, much like how the vast majority of military drones flown over land are unarmed. Even ACTUV, the Navy's large experimental submarine hunting autonomous ship, is designed to find enemies, not destroy them. A team of smaller robots, operating on the edge of a fleet, could find foes while the armed and human-carrying vehicles are further out of range, almost forming a robotic vanguard between danger and people.