The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is revising the Energy Star specification for servers to take into account significant system design changes and help buyers make effective purchasing decisions. Over the last few years, server makers have increasingly used coprocessors to boost computing power and given memory a bigger role in processing data. While memory has gotten more power-efficient, coprocessors can suck up a lot of energy. The upcoming, version 3.0 of the Energy Star spec for servers is aimed at helping buyers understand the power-efficiency levels of the new systems. The Energy Star program is already used in computers, appliances, electronics and many other products.

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

Maybe Skynet will not be our future. Maybe artificial intelligence will not be the machines that disdainfully wipe us out, but instead, will be the long-awaited "little child" who finally leads our species out of its vicious cycles of violence, red in tooth and claw. I had an interesting thought while - appropriately - sitting on a beach by Malibu watching the red sun sink into the sea... Humans evolved as prey animals. According to Sapiens author, Yuval Harari, for a whoppingly overwhelming majority of our evolution, we were bear and tiger food. And so we developed the quick-twitch fight-or flight reactivity of prey animals, always on guard.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) is one of the'Eight Great Technologies' identified by the UK Government in 2012. A national strategy for RAS innovation from a'RAS Special Interest Group' was published by Innovate UK in 2014. The Government responded to that strategy in March 2015 (PDF 405 KB) and agreed to establish a RAS Leadership Council to oversee its execution. The Special Interest Group also published'The UK Landscape for Robotics and Autonomous Systems' in 2015. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council launched an UK-RAS network, also in 2015.

Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

Oh, racist Internet trolls… is there anything you won't try to ruin? Microsoft this week created a Twitter account for its experimental artificial intelligence project called Tay that was designed to interact with "18 to 24 year olds in the U.S., the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US." Tay is supposed to become a smarter conversationalist the more it interacts with people and learns their speech patterns. The problem arose when a pack of trolls decided to teach Tay how to say a bunch of offensive and racist things that Microsoft had to delete from its Twitter account. DON'T MISS: Greatest Instagram account ever posts nothing but cringeworthy Tinder chats Although the tweets have been deleted, Business Insider managed to take screencaps of some of the very worst ones. As The Guardian notes, Tay's new "friends" also convinced it to lend its support to a certain doughy, stubby-handed presidential candidate running this year who's quickly become a favorite among white supremacists: So nice work, trolls: You took a friendly AI chatbot and turned it into a genocidal maniac in a matter of hours.

Less than a day after Microsoft unleashed Tay, its experimental A.I., to social networks including Twitter and Kik, the chatbot's already become a racist jerk you wouldn't ever want to be friends with. Designed by Microsoft Research to better understand how 18- to 24-year-olds speak, Tay has definitely developed a strong personality. Here are some choice tweets showing Tay's dark side (none of which should be taken seriously): Tay sounds like a real racist douchebag at first. But to be fair, it's mostly just repeating what people are tweeting at it. Still, it's an unsettling sign that A.I. can emulate humanity's worst traits.

In a few years, the exterior of the International Space Station could be crawling with geckos. The robotic geckos could follow from an experiment NASA launched to the International Space Station on Tuesday aboard an uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft. The Gecko Gripper devices use tiny artificial hairs that replicate the ones geckos use to climb walls. They are designed to help astronauts to keep track of objects in zero gravity, and enable robots to crawl around a spacecraft to inspect and repair it. The bots have already been tested on parabolic aircraft flights, where they grabbed and manipulated 10-kilogram and 100-kg objects during 20-second periods of microgravity.

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

Drones are experiencing something of an arms race for aerial domination. As fast as the technology develops to make the unmanned vehicles better in the air, new ways are being developed to take them down. Video footage has emerged of a soldier in the US using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight before falling out of the air. Video footage has emerged of a US soldier using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight and fall out of the air (still pictured). The cyber-rifle is built by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point in the US, and was tested in front of the US Secretary for Defense, Ash Carter.