Amazon made a $1.7 billion offer for iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robot vacuums, mops and other household robots. The deal will keep Colin Angle as iRobot's CEO but is still contingent on the approval of regulators and iRobot shareholders. Founded in 1990 by MIT researchers, the company initially focused on military robots like PackBot. It marked a major turning point in 2002 when it unveiled the first Roomba -- the debut robovac racked up sales of a million units by 2004. The company eventually bowed out of the military business in 2016.

The search for'another Earth' has been a staple of science fiction for decades, and now a group of astronomers hope to discover one on our galactic doorstep. Alpha Centauri is a triple star system just over four light years from the Earth, split into a pair of sun-like stars known as AB, and a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. So far planets have only been found orbiting Proxima Centauri, but experts from the University of Sydney and Breakthrough Initiatives believe they will find a world orbiting the larger binary pair using a new privately funded telescope. Known as the Toliman mission, it will launch in 2023 and scan Alpha Centauri AB for worlds in the habitable zone, where liquid water can flow on the surface. The team hope to be able to say whether there are habitable worlds orbiting either or both of the binary stars by the middle of this decade.

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

My colleagues and I look for extraterrestrial life, including intelligent beings – or in the vernacular, aliens. It's exciting times for people like me, because extra-terrestrial life is being widely discussed now in the lead-up to the Pentagon's highly anticipated report on so-called unexplained aerial phenomena. Yet, I should say straight away that, I am not expecting any big revelations out of the report. I think it's overwhelmingly likely that aliens are present in our galaxy. But I don't believe they're hanging out in our airspace.

British engineers are set to build a spacecraft that will track down and'ambush' comets in order to study them in unprecedented detail. The mission, dubbed the'comet chaser', will feature three main components, a mothership built by a company called Thales Alenia Space based in the UK, and two robotic probes which will be manufactured by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). Astronomers hope the highly-detailed 3D-scans of the space rock's surface will reveal secrets about the formation of comets and the early universe. British engineers are set to build a spacecraft that will track down and ambush comets in order to scan them in unprecedented detail. Comets are chunks of icy rock spewed out from fierce explosions following the universe's inception.

The biggest knock against sending robots to explore the solar system for signs of life has always been their inability to make intuitive, even creative decisions as effectively as humans can. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to narrow that gap soon--which is a good thing, because there are no immediate plans to send people to explore Mars's subterranean caves or search for hydrothermal vents below Europa's icy waters. For the foreseeable future those roles will likely be filled by nearly autonomous rovers and submarines that can withstand hostile conditions and conduct important science experiments, even when out of contact with Earth for weeks or even months. When Steve Chien took over NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Group in the mid-1990s, such sophisticated AI seemed more like science fiction than something destined to play a crucial role to the success of NASA's upcoming 2020 mission to Mars. Chien had a vision to make the technology an indispensable part of NASA's biggest missions.

This article is by Featured Blogger Shelly Palmer from his blog. If you want to build a ship to take humans to Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Earth), when should you start the project? If you start today, you might be ready to launch your ship in about 500 years, and accounting for exponential technological advances, you might get there in 10,000 years or so. However, if you wait 5,000 years to start building your ship, you may only need 500 years of travel time. So waiting 5,000 years to start the project might get you there 5,000 years before people who start the project today.

If you want to build a ship to take humans to Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Earth), when should you start the project? If you start today, you might be ready to launch your ship in about 500 years, and accounting for exponential technological advances, you might get there in 10,000 years or so. However, if you wait 5,000 years to start building your ship, you may only need 500 years of travel time. So waiting 5,000 years to start the project might get you there 5,000 years before people who start the project today. This completely hypothetical thought starter is one of my favorite ways to explore investment strategies in the age of exponentialism.

The cheetah can accelerate from zero to 96.6 kph in under three seconds. These cases show where the Google approach gives inferior answers. If you type the first question into Google, you get a "Popular on the web" snippet with photos of several candidates. Google just reads this, even omitting any kind of pause after "web" and before "cheetah." To top it off, the correct answer isn't even in the list it reads, and appears 10th in the list of animals. In the second question, you also don't get the correct answer from Google.

If you want to build a ship to take humans to Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Earth), when should you start the project? If you start today, you might be ready to launch your ship in about 500 years, and accounting for exponential technological advances, you might get there in 10,000 years or so. However, if you wait 5,000 years to start building your ship, you may only need 500 years of travel time. So waiting 5,000 years to start the project might get you there 5,000 years before people who start the project today. This completely hypothetical thought-starter is one of my favorite ways to explore investment strategies in the age of exponentialism. When to start using machine learning in your business is not a hypothetical question; it's a question you must answer today.