NASA's Curiosity rover has made a'mind-blowing' discovery on Mars that scientists said'should not be there.' The one-ton rover uncovered yellowish-green crystals of pure sulfur during its search for chemical evidence that the Red Planet was once habitable. While minerals containing sulfur have been observed in the Martian world, elemental sulfur on its own has never been seen before. Curiosity accidently cracked opening white stones as it traveled through the Gediz Vallis channel, revealing the'strange' structures that add to the growing evidence that Mars was once a habitable world. Previous research has suggested that sulfur may have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth more than four billion years ago when the atmosphere was rich in sulfur and carbon, which was emitted through volcanic activity.

The retirement wars are heating up. As millions of baby boomers leave their jobs in the coming years and transition into retirement, there is a huge competition for who will manage their savings. On one hand are traditional wealth managers, firms like Edward Jones, who either employ full-time human financial advisors or empower independent contractors to help clients plan through their finances. On the other side has been the rise of "roboadvisors" like Wealthfront that use algorithms and simple financial products like ETFs to advise people at lower cost. VCs have been bullish on roboadvisors -- startups like Wealthfront and Personal Capital have each raised more than $200 million according to Crunchbase -- but there has been less investment activity trying to help the financial advisors themselves.

The founders of Vise AI met when they were 13, a couple of teenagers more interested in applied artificial intelligence than English class. Fast-forward several years and the pair has relocated from the Midwest to San Francisco to raise money for a financial technology business they've been self-funding since 2016. As teenagers with an inordinate amount of AI knowledge, Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra proved to be quite useful to large businesses, investment bankers and other financiers. Leveraging their AI know-how, they were paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach financial "experts" about AI. Mehrotra, according to Vasavada, is a mathematical prodigy: "And that translates extremely well to AI, right, because what underlies AI is math," Vasavada, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vise AI, tells TechCrunch.

The founders of Vise AI met when they were 13, a couple of teenagers more interested in applied artificial intelligence than English class. Fast-forward several years and the pair has relocated from the Midwest to San Francisco to raise money for a financial technology business they've been self-funding since 2016. As teenagers with an inordinate amount of AI knowledge, Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra proved to be quite useful to large businesses, investment bankers and other financiers. Leveraging their AI know-how, they were paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach financial "experts" about AI. Mehrotra, according to Vasavada, is a mathematical prodigy: "And that translates extremely well to AI, right, because what underlies AI is math," Vasavada, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vise AI, tells TechCrunch.

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is for the first time testing an improvised new percussive drilling technique intended to pound subsurface samples into powder in hopes of better understanding the shallow Martian subsurface. After a year's drilling hiatus, Curiosity is again back to drilling samples in rocks at the surface of Mars' Gale Crater. This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the'Mojave' site, where its drill collected the mission's second taste of Mount Sharp. The scene combines dozens of images taken during January 2015 by the MAHLI camera at the... "If all goes well and we can continue drilling, the science team hopes to learn how the ancient climate at Gale crater, and the prospects for life there, changed over time," Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity Rover's project scientist, told me. Curiosity's drilling capability was knocked out of business in December 2016, when the motor that moves Curiosity's drill back and forth became unreliable, Vasavada told me.