The night after their son Mats died aged just 25, Trude and Robert Steen sat on the sofa in their living room in Oslo with their daughter Mia. "Everything was a blur," remembers Trude of that day 10 years ago. "Then Robert said, 'Maybe we should reach out to Mats' friends in World of Warcraft.'" Mats was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive condition that causes the muscles to weaken gradually. He was diagnosed aged four and started using a wheelchair at 10.

Alien life on other planets could be in the form of robots who have outlived their creators, according to the Astronomer Royal. And alarmingly, that is the same fate which may befall people on Earth too. Numerous Hollywood films have presented the possibilities of robots becoming self-aware and deciding to destroy humans so they can rule the world. But Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told Cheltenham Science Festival robots taking over was a possibility. No life beyond Earth has ever been found; there is no evidence that alien life has ever visited our planet.

The world's space agencies should scrap plans to send astronauts to the moon and Mars and leave them to explorers and billionaires who can privately fund and risk such adventures, the astronomer royal says. Lord Martin Rees said technical improvements and more sophisticated artificial intelligence meant robotic missions were becoming ever more capable of exploration, and even construction, in space, making it unnecessary for space agencies to front far-flung human missions. "We should not have publicly funded programmes to send people to the moon, still less to Mars," said Rees. "It's hugely risky, hugely expensive, and there's no practical or scientific benefit to sending humans. His comments prompted a robust defence from some experts, who stressed that government-backed spacefaring is a way to project soft power and provided huge inspiration, adding that the private sector could turn space into the "wild west". But Rees argues we should encourage and cheer on explorers and billionaire entrepreneurs who want to leave Earth in search of adventure in the spirit of Shackleton and Scott – both of whom died on Antarctic expeditions. The SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, has long enthused about moving to Mars, noting "there's a good chance of death". While human genetic modification should be heavily regulated on Earth, Rees said, Mars settlers would be free to enhance their children to cope with life on the red planet. Doing so could drive the divergence of the species, he added, raising the unsettling prospect of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs being the seed stock for a bunch of puny post-humans, given the weak Martian gravity. "They will have every incentive to try to redesign themselves and these changes are going to be rapid compared with Darwinian evolution," Rees said. "If something evolves that's rather different from present day human beings, it's likely to evolve from them, not us." Astronauts last set foot on the moon half a century ago. Since then, humans have not ventured further than a few hundred miles into space, mostly to the International Space Station. Space agencies, including from the US, Europe, China and Russia, are now on course to return to the moon. Mars is next in line. The cost is considerable because humans are fragile. The US president, Joe Biden, has requested $26bn (£20.6bn) for Nasa in 2023, with $7.5bn earmarked for the Artemis programme which aims to put the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon as early as 2025. "I think many people support the idea of science in space and assume humans are an essential part of that.

Whether actual or fictional--Buzz Aldrin or Buzz Lightyear--astronauts embody what most of us see as the best and bravest aspects of humankind. So you have to admire the mettle of authors Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees who argue that, in almost all cases, space exploration is too important to leave to fallible, vulnerable human beings. Robots, they write, "can go boldly where humans rightly fear to tread." The authors certainly know their topic. Mr. Rees is the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal (talk about a title!) and a former Cambridge University professor.

Neath Port Talbot Council is understood to have become the first local authority in Wales to use a robot to process back office administration. The council has been trialling the new technology, known as Robotics Process Automate (RPA), to process Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks and update employee information. At a personnel committee meeting head of resources Sheenagh Rees told councillors the robot had helped clear a backlog of data inputting within a matter of weeks. She said: "Since 2013 there has been a 50% reduction of administration staff in HR but we have only had increasing demand for our services. "The reason we were interested in using RPA was because it could help us deal with a high volume of work we weren't able to do.

A new open-source library by Nvidia could be the secret ingredient to advancing analytics and making graph databases faster. Nvidia has long ago stopped being "just" a hardware company. As its hardware is what much of the compute supporting the explosion in AI runs on, Nvidia has taken upon itself the task of paving the last mile to the software. Nvidia does this by developing and releasing libraries that software developers and data scientists can use to integrate GPU power in their work. The premise is simple: Not everyone is a specialist in parallelism or wants to be one.

Are technology companies running too fast into the future and creating things that could potentially wreak havoc on humankind? That question has been swirling around in my head ever since I saw the enthralling science-fiction film "Ex Machina." The movie offers a clever version of the robots versus humans narrative. But what makes "Ex Machina" different from the usual special-effects blockbuster is the ethical questions it poses. Foremost among them is something that most techies don't seem to want to answer: Who is making sure that all of this innovation does not go drastically wrong?

Two new UCL Pro-Vice-Provosts, for London and for Artificial Intelligence, have been appointed to strengthen the delivery of the institutional strategy, UCL 2034. Professor Alan Thomson, Dean of Brain Sciences, will serve as Pro-Vice-Provost (London), and Professor Geraint Rees, Dean of Life Sciences, will serve as Pro-Vice-Provost (Artificial Intelligence). As Pro Vice-Provost (London), Professor Thompson will lead and coordinate UCL's activities to consolidate and advance its position as London's global university – in, of and for London. Professor Thompson says: "This is a great opportunity to raise the profile of UCL in London and to underline how London benefits from UCL and, in turn, how UCL benefits from being at the very heart of London. I am delighted to be taking on this role and look forward to engaging with everyone working in this space in UCL and beyond to achieve these objectives."

THE importance of science in society has no greater spokesperson than Lord Martin Rees. From his perch at Cambridge--and a centre he formed on studying existential risks--he has served as both a promoter, populariser and the moral conscience of scientific endeavour far beyond his academic field of astrophysics. In "Our Final Century" in 2003 (retitled more breathlessly "Our Final Hour" in the American edition) he presented a range of global challenges, from bioterrorism to nuclear weapons. He put the risk of human extinction by 2100 from our technologies at around 50%. His latest book, "On the Future", is more sanguine.

In 2004, the year before he became president of Britain's Royal Society, Martin Rees memorably remarked that "we are no wiser than Aristotle was more than 2000 years ago." The reason that humankind has made such extraordinary scientific progress since Aristotle's time, Rees argued, is primarily because of technological advances, such as telescopes and space probes in the case of astronomy--his own field of expertise. Rees's latest book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, written "as a scientist, as a citizen, and as a worried member of the human species," is really a meditation on this earlier thought, short in extent but wide in range: from redesigning genes, through the likelihood of human-induced climate change, to the possibility of encounters with alien intelligence in the Universe. Its overall theme is that Earth's growing population will flourish only if science and technology are deployed with "wisdom." Inevitably, much of the interest in this topic derives from the author's predictions about the coming decades, although Rees is mindful of the fact that scientists are "rotten forecasters--almost as bad as economists."