Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is practically a folk hero in the global tech community. He has earned his reputation innovating new technology, questioning the status quo and lobbying for societal change. This week, his company's user conference, Dreamforce, is forecasted to bring as many as 170,000 of his followers to town. Benioff will, in turn, deliver first time experiences to many attendees. Many of the public restrooms at the conference, for example, are gender neutral.

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

As part of the ongoing Beyond Fest, on Sunday night "2001: A Space Odyssey" will show at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood with actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in attendance. And while that is cause enough for excitement among movie fans, it is possible the real star of the evening could be the physical print of the movie itself. The event will be the debut screening for a new 70-mm print that the American Cinematheque will have exclusive exhibition rights to in a five-year deal with Warner Brothers. The Cinematheque will schedule two extended runs for the print per year, one at the Egyptian and one at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. Though Sunday night's event is already sold out, the print will screen again in December when it receives a run at the Egyptian on Dec. 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 26 and 27.

Stocks extended their winning streak to a fourth session on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday, backed by the yen's further drop against the dollar and a brighter U.S. economic outlook. The Nikkei average rose 79.86 points, or 0.47 percent, to finish at 16,899.10. On Wednesday, it gained 83.59 points. The Topix index closed up 6.12 points, or 0.45 percent, at 1,353.93, after climbing 7.60 points the previous day. The Tokyo market opened sharply higher thanks to the weaker yen and gains on Wall Street.

Jin Kawaguchiya gave up a career in finance to help revive Japan's ailing dairy industry, one robot at a time. In a country that relies increasingly on imported foods like cheese and butter, Japan's milk output tumbled over two decades, touching a 30-year low in 2014. Costs rose faster than prices as the economy stagnated, eroding profit, and aging farmers quit the business because they could not find enough young people willing to take on the hard labor of tending to cows every day. But technology is altering that dynamic. On Hokkaido, Japan's top dairy-producing region, Kawaguchiya transformed the 20-cow farm he inherited from his father-in-law 16 years ago into Asia's largest automated milking factory.

And ways to achieve a good night's sleep

Almost a quarter century ago, a book was written about how organizations would focus on share of customer as opposed to share of market, building a personalized collaboration driven by big data. With advanced analytics, banking may finally getting close to realizing this vision. In 1993, a then revolutionary book, "The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time" was published, proposing the idea that as technology makes it affordable to track individual customers, marketing shifts from finding customers for products to finding products for customers. According to the authors, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., a company could use technology to gather information about, and to communicate directly with, individuals to form a commercial bond. The book became a bestseller, and was on every marketer's bookshelf … almost a quarter century ago.

The flotation pod is smaller than I'd expected. It's white and round like an egg and, at first glance, seems like it couldn't be any longer than I am tall. Sitting in a tiled treatment room at a day spa in Carroll Gardens, the pod looks incongruous, like someone left an oversize computer mouse in a bathroom. I'm here, at a place called Lift Floats, to try sensory-deprivation flotation -- a Sixties throwback technology, invented by the neuroscientist John C. Lilly (best remembered today as the guy who came up with oddball experiments to study human-dolphin communication), that has lately regained popularity, particularly among athletes and Silicon Valley types. After being shown to the room, I shower, enter the pod naked, and close the lid. I lie back as the pod starts to play gentle music and the faint LED lights bathe the water in colors.

The way that we understand one another has been finely tuned over millions of years, to the point where it's hard to believe anything could outperform humans when it comes to understanding humans. I'm convinced though, that within the next five to ten years, that belief will gradually disappear, as machines get better and better at making sense of our emotions. This is the field of affective computing, or what I affectionately call, artificial emotional intelligence. The first signs of the shift to more emotionally intelligent software are already starting to appear on the market, and I'll touch on them in a moment. But first, I want to disclose a strong conviction: I believe emotional intelligence is absolutely essential to artificial intelligence.

This episode includes some amazing stories from some brilliant guests all talking about technology and its impact in our modern world. First you hear from Jim Hendler. Jim is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He talks to us about AI and privacy issues on the web. He has a new book out soon so be sure to get it here.