French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials on Thursday in the French city of Marseille following a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

DEVELOPING: A contractor who threatened to set off a bomb at the headquarters of Fox 45 Baltimore Thursday afternoon, forcing police to evacuate the building, walked outside before a sniper shot him as cameras rolled. The suspect, a man in his 20s, was still alive but refused to cooperate with officers, police spokesman T.J. Smith said. Reporters said they saw him kick off some of his clothing. When he walked out of the building, he was wearing a white panda suit, a surgical mask and sunglasses. Robot trying to get suspect to show his hands.

Video game plots don't always have the best reputations. It can be hard to keep a coherent story together when you're also trying to let a player explore an open world, or choose between branching storylines. But there are quite a few people in the industry who are working to make video game plots more like those in television or film. "Quantum Break," released earlier this month by Remedy Entertainment, blurs the lines between "traditional" media and video games even more than usual. The game features live-action sequences intercut between gameplay that stars the actors who are portraying the (very realistic) digital characters in the more traditional gameplay.

The machine learning community has responded to a paper published this week that introduced a method of colorizing black-and-white photos using artificial intelligence. One redditor, mar_cnu, used this new automated colorization technique on a trailer for 1964 French film La 317 ème Section (The 317th Platoon), a black-and-white movie about a French platoon stuck behind enemy lines at the end of the Indochina War. The results are pretty cool, although the colorization isn't great. There are some shots, especially those that should have a lot of blue and green in them (like scenes in jungles or rivers), that look convincing -- at least as Technicolor film. But mostly, the method struggles to adjust itself, especially when focusing on close-ups of people, turning entire scenes green, brown, and sepia.

Samantha Gilweit, who is used to performing improv comedy in front of large crowds, went with her best opening bit, the one about drunken princesses that never fails. She delivered the punchline, and…dead silence. Her mind raced with how to recover. A second later, smiley-face emoji appeared over the heads of the animated robots and digitally rendered humanoids that stood in for the audience, followed by a gush of hearts. That's how "you knew you were killing it," the 31-year-old said.

Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant is spreading to third-party hardware with the Triby connected speaker. The 199 Triby from Invoxia is in some ways similar to Amazon's Echo speaker. Using Alexa voice commands, it connects to Internet radio services such as Pandora and Spotify, delivers the weather and other information, lets you buy stuff from Amazon, and can control a range of connected-home devices. And like the Echo, the Triby supports always-on voice commands, so you can control these functions from across the room. But while Echo requires a power cord to operate, Triby has a built-in battery that lasts up to two weeks on a charge, and provides eight to 10 hours of music playback.

"Stories don't interest me," Geoff Dyer told the Huffington Post in 2014. That this is true is evident in his new collection of essays, "White Sands." Which doesn't mean that "White Sands" isn't a good read, because it is. You must, however, get used to Dyer's tone, which is persnickety and unenthusiastic. His virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesn't pretend to be heading anywhere, but then "White Sands" turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving.

The Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei said that he will release a documentary film next year on the refugee crisis. Ai, often described as China's most high-profile artist, was speaking at a news conference in Bern to mark the opening of the "Chinese Whispers" exhibition, featuring around 150 works of contemporary Chinese artists - including Ai Weiwei artwork "Fragments"- at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern. Ai said he has spent a lot of time in refugee camps in recent months and witnessed a "very difficult situation" and decided to share his experience by making a film. "It's a documentary film, we have been shooting over 600 hours, and I've did hundred of interviews, there is all kind of people: politicians, refugees or priests or NGOs…all kind of people involved in this crisis," Weiwei told reporters. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei looks on as he visits a migrant's makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 9, 2016.

The first time I saw it, I was like, 'You people are nuts, this is not going to be interesting.' And by the end I was cheering. You just kind of get into it once these robots start racing."

The next J.J. Abrams-produced original sci-fi film has just signed its lead actors, and perhaps spilled some more plot details. According to Variety, J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot company has landed actors David Oyelowo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw to star in God Particle, the latest in Bad Robot's series of low-budget sci-fi originals that includes 2008's Cloverfield and this month's 10 Cloverfield Lane. Oyelowo is best known for his inspired portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in 2013's Selma, but has also appeared in Jack Reacher and A Most Violent Year, while Mbatha-Raw has shown up in Concussion, Beyond the Lights and the short-lived 2010 Bad Robot series Undercovers. Meanwhile, the official plot synopsis for God Particle, which is being directed by Julius Onah, follows "a team of astronauts on a mission who make a terrifying discovery that challenges all they know about the fabric of reality, as they desperately fight for survival." But The Wrap has added a few new wrinkles to that narrative, reporting that the film "follows an American space station crew who, believing they have destroyed Earth via a Hadron accelerator, allow the crew of hostile nations to board their ship, with disastrous results."