To do capable and useful things, your robot needs capable and useful sensors, which is just another way of saying that your robot needs you to spend a lot of money on it. This is really too bad, because hardware cost is enormously restrictive for robots, especially ones that are intended to be affordable by people who haven't co-founded a robotics startup or something (I think there are a few people left who have yet to do this). In particular, distance sensors that allow your robot to detect and avoid obstacles tend to be both very useful and very expensive, but if you want one that works reliably outdoors, start saving, because they cost thousands of dollars. At MIT, a group of researchers led by Professor Li-Shiuan Peh designed a phone-based laser rangefinder that costs a total of 49, plus a smartphone that you're not using anymore. Is it the greatest laser rangefinder ever?

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

Students who created a record-breaking remote-controlled multicopter drone say they hope to get permission to fly a person in its structure. The University of Oslo team built the large unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), dubbed the Megakopter, over an 18 month period. It contains 13 propellers and eight hexacopters powered by a total of 48 motors that reside on a frame built from aluminum and plywood. Students who created a record-breaking remote-controlled multicopter drone say they hope to get permission to fly a person in its structure. The drone cost more than 200,000 Norwegian kroners ( 21,600 or 15,000) to make and took two years.

Sports stars such as Sir Steve Redgrave and Muhammad Ali claim a positive mental attitude is the most important part of preparing for a big race or bout in the ring. Now scientists have uncovered the uncovered the physical circuits in the brain that determine whether a fight will be won or lost. Deep within the brain, in a structure called the habenula, two neural circuits work in a complex interplay to influence the outcome of a battle. Scientists have uncovered the uncovered the physical circuits in the brain that determine whether a fight will be won or lost. This image shows changes in nerve excitation from the habenula region in a winner and loser zebrafish.

Choosing the perfect picture caption can be a daunting task. Knowing whether to point out certain details or add a humorous tone can be perplexing - but now there is a bot that can figure it out for you. Now, Microsoft hopes its AI will be able to do the job for you. Simply choose an image you'd like CaptionBot to analyze, upload it and the bot creates a description that seems to be pretty accurate -- in just a few seconds. CaptionBot uses natural language and computer vision to analyze pictures and write a descriptive caption -- and it will even add an appropriate emoji. The technology can decipher gender, distinguish celebrities, determine facial expressions and uses emojis to give its description more character.

Most single women look to their girlfriends for advice about dating. But instead of telling them about a conversation or sending screen shots they can now eavesdrop without being detected. Boompi is a dating app that lets women add their girl friends to private conversations with prospective suitors so they can give advice or just watch the romance unravel. But now instead of telling them about a conversation or sending screen shots your friends can eavesdrop without being detected. Boompi uses the swipe'yes' or'no' function to determine a match.

There's a wide class of generative models for which variational methods are the only known practical way to do inference. This includes basically any model with black-box ("neural") dependence relations, and many others as well, e.g., Bayesian nonparametrics for any significant dataset size. The point of variational methods is not to calculate partition functions (although you do get that as a side effect); the point is to fit sophisticated models that have complex latent structure. Which does yield improvements across pretty much any metric you'd care about.

I want to suggest that while smartphones give us communication - and do so very well - they do not allow us to take part in conversation in any real sense. Think for a moment about what a traditional, old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood conversation involves. It's not just words: there are silences, hesitant exploratory phrases, eye contact, facial expressions, laughter, hand gestures and possibly even physical touches of reassurance or encouragement. The fact that there is no technological intermediate means that such conversations are spontaneous. They can spread free and wide, bouncing one moment into a joke, sliding the next into some subtle expression of regret or even becoming one of those silences that says more than words.

Hunting submarines is dull, dangerous work. It's an elaborate game of sonar-fueled cat-and-mouse in vast stretches of open water, where the stakes are "finding foreign nations' seaborne nuclear weapons," or finding the foreign subs looking for our own seaborne nukes. DARPA, the Pentagon's future-war focused agency, wants to make it easier to find submarines, and they're enlisting robots to do it. The A is short for "Anti-submarine warfare", or ASW, and the rest of the name is ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel. The ship hit water in the middle of February, looking like nothing so much as a sparse gray Battleship piece.

Young scientists should be valued by their commitment to education, their dedication to fighting inequality in science, and their efforts to democratize science.