UNITED NATIONS The United Nations is ready to deliver aid into Syria's Aleppo, but needs commitments from all parties in the war - not just Russia - to abide by a 48-hour humanitarian truce, the U.N. aid chief, angered by lack of assistance to civilians, said on Monday.

You can get a pretty good idea of a country's wealth by seeing how much it shines at night – just compare the intense brightness of China and South Korea to the dark mass of North Korea that's sandwiched between them. But nighttime lights don't tell you which neighborhoods or villages within a large region are merely poor and which are home to people living in abject poverty. That's the level of detail policymakers need when they decide where to deploy their economic development programs. You could get that detail by sending legions of survey-takers into crowded slums and sparsely populated rural areas. But that would be hugely time-consuming and cost tens of millions of dollars or more.

Iraq built an armed robotic vehicle, according to Baghdad Post, and it could be used to take back a town occupied by ISIS. Based on Defense One's translation of the story, the robot is car-sized and tank-like, equipped with an automatic machine gun and a rocket launcher. It also has four cameras to be able to show operators its field of view, since it's controlled using a laptop from a kilometer away. That distance means its operators still have to be on the battlefield, but at least they can stay hidden and safe while the machine does its job. It's not exactly clear who built this vehicle nicknamed "Alrobot" (that's Arabic for robot).

IBM created a computer chip that works like a brain. Now, Samsung has used it to create a biologically inspired digital eye. The IBM chip, called TrueNorth, is built of 4,096 tiny computing cores that form about a million digital brain cells and 256 million connections. Together they act like the brain's neurons, sending short messages to one another to process data. The design, known as neuromorphic computing, marks a dramatic departure from traditional chips that run software packaged into strict sequences of instructions.

The robot is named MUTT, and it has a human-controlled gun on its back. Soldier are preparing for war with robots. Soldiers are preparing for war, alongside robots. As part of the Pacific Manned-Unmanned Initiative, soldiers with the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division tested prototypes of robots, to see if they might be useful in future battles. Those robots included everything from the basic, like flying quadcopter drone scouts... They're called Multipurpose Unmanned Tactical Transports, or MUTTs, and while they aren't exactly robots that fire their own guns, with a soldier on the back they turn deadly pretty quick.

Welcome to Essential Politics, our daily feed on California government and politics news. We've also got a brand new bill tracking page for some of this month's biggest state Capitol debates. Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen (R-Modesto) trotted out a high-tech prop to speak against a bill on Monday: Siri, the electronic personal assistant on Apple iPhones. Speaking against a measure by Assemblyman Ian Calderon (D-Whittier) that requires online entertainment subscription services to remove actors' ages and birth dates upon request, Olsen used her iPhone to demonstrate such information was readily available. When prompted, Siri served up the ages of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future. Last year we looked at Tesla's prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of Liberty magazine. The article is unique because it wasn't conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla's other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as "by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck."

China is building its next-generation cruise missiles using "high-level artificial intelligence" to make them suitable for specific combat situations. A senior missile designer has claimed that Chinese engineers have been studying the use of artificial intelligence in missiles for years and are now pushing ahead to turn it into reality. Wang Changqing, director of the general design department of the Third Academy of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, told the state-run China Daily that flexible and modular design for future weapons was the need of the hour. A modular missile system is flexible and multifunctional, and enables manufacturers to cut down on the development and storage costs, a senior researcher at the Beijing Hiwing Scientific and Technological Information Institute, told the paper on condition of anonymity. Terming the plans to develop the modular cruise missiles a "promising approach", he added that such weapons also prolong the operational range and duration of a mission.

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

Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe. As much as that data has the potential to provide invaluable information to humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and policymakers, there is too much of it to sift through in order to draw insights that could influence important decisions. A team of researchers from Stanford University, however, says it has developed an efficient way. By creating a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize signs of poverty in satellite images – such as condition of roads – the team sorted through a million images to accurately identify economic conditions in five African countries, reported the scientists in the journal Science on Thursday.