NASA spotted pieces of asteroid Vesta ranging in size from five to 14 feet scattered across Bennu's southern hemisphere and near its center. The boulders were detected in images from the OSIRIS-Rex and appear much brighter than the surrounding area of dark, rich carbon. The team analyzed the chunks using an on-board spectrometer and found signs of the mineral pyroxene - a known compound on Vesta. NASA theorizes the material came from Bennu's parent asteroid that was struck by a fragment from Vesta. NASA spotted pieces of asteroid Vesta ranging in size from five to 14 feet scattered across Bennu's southern hemisphere and near its center. Hannah Kaplan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said: 'Our leading hypothesis is that Bennu inherited this material from its parent asteroid after a vestoid (a fragment from Vesta) struck the parent.'

Payments solutions provider Vesta today announced that it raised $125 million in capital, bringing its total raised to over $145 million. The company says it will use the financing to grow and accelerate the deployment of its fraud protection and ecommerce payment products. Payment fraud is pervasive -- in 2018, $24.26 billion was lost due to credit card fraud worldwide, reports Shift Processing. That same year, the rate of card fraud increased by nearly 20% as the U.S. took the lead in reported losses. Vesta says its AI-powered decisioning platform helps clients to assess the risk of this fraud and ultimately to prevent fraud from occurring, with connectors that tie into existing software from vendors including Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and SAP Commerce Cloud.

LAKE OSWEGO, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vesta, a pioneer in guaranteed payment and fraud technologies, announced today that it has hired Tan Truong as chief information officer. He will be responsible for all aspects of the company's technology, operations and product development as well as spearheading innovation globally. Truong joins Vesta after building the global issuing platform for SVM LP, a leading provider of gift and prepaid cards for the incentive industry, and has more than 15 years of experience in financial technology. His track record includes two successful exits for companies whose technology platforms and teams he helped build, with FSV Payment Systems being acquired by U.S. Bank and UniRush being acquired by Green Dot. He has worked at startups and large corporations, in both strategic and hands-on technologist roles.

Amazon Alexa, which sits in your house and accepts voice commands enabling it to play music, activate lights, read news headlines and many other functions, is one of several intelligent personal assistants currently vying for dominance alongside Google Home and the Apple HomePod. Now however, Amazon is aiming to take this technology one step further by implementing it in to an actual robot that can not only answer questions, but also move autonomously around your home. Codenamed'Vesta', the new device is currently being worked on by Amazon's Lab126 research and development arm in Sunnyvale, California. According to reports, the web giant had intended to reveal the robot earlier this year but it wasn't quite ready for mass-production and more engineers have since been assigned to help speed things along. Rumor has it that the robot will be about waist-high and can navigate using an array of cameras.

Amazon is developing a higher quality version of the Echo speaker and ramping up work on its home robot. The company plans to release the new Echo by next year, according to people familiar with the product. Prototypes of the cylindrical speaker are wider than the current Echo to squeeze in additional components including at least four tweeters, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The robot, previously reported by Bloomberg, has wheels and can be controlled by Alexa voice commands, the people said. Both devices are being developed by Amazon Lab126, a research and development arm based in Sunnyvale, California.

Amazon is inching closer to making a wheeled robotic assistant that can be controlled via its Echo smart speakers. In a report from Bloomberg, sources from Amazon say the company has pulled engineers off of other projects to develop the bot -- a show of faith that indicates Amazon may soon look to bring the wheeled-assistant to market. The robot, called'Vesta', is controlled by Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, and measures about waist-high according to Bloomberg. Amazon is inching closer to making a wheeled robotic assistant that can be controlled via its Echo smart speakers. It's unclear exactly what the intended purpose of the device would be, though speculation is that the bot would be a kind of mobile Echo, bringing the Alexa capabilities with users around their home.

Amazon Echo devices are compatible with a multitude of smart home products. Amazon's Echo smart speaker is reportedly about to get a premium upgrade. Citing people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg published a report on Friday saying that the e-commerce giant is poised to unveil a next-level Echo in 2020 that's larger in size to accommodate new technology, better sound and at least four tweeters. The online tech behemoth has previously worked to upgrade the Echo's sound with software tweaks, offering a standalone subwoofer and add-ons that connect the speaker to a stereo. An Echo with improved sound quality would directly rival high-end Sonos speakers and Apple's acoustically rich $300 HomePod.

Writing about AI for an appreciable amount of time is, in my experience, enough to make any reasonable person concerned about the future of humanity. But I worry the focus of that concern is too often directed at the relatively distant future, which could lead to unforeseen consequences in the present. Headlines from the past few months illuminate how bad things can get. Consider the cases of the self-driving Uber that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona and that of the Apple engineer who was killed when his Tesla, driving on Autopilot, plowed into a traffic barrier on the highway. You're probably aware of the content suggestion algorithms from Facebook and YouTube, which have been implicated in the spread of fake news and extremist views.

Yesterday, Bloomberg broke a story that Amazon's Lab126 research and development group in San Francisco has been working on some kind of mobile home robot. It's not a huge surprise to see Amazon throwing its R&D budget at more robots, and a home robot is a perfectly logical thing for them to take a crack at. The question is, what kind of robot is Amazon building, and what will it be able to do? While we're obviously hoping for an affordable, useful robot, it won't be easy, and Amazon will have a lot of work to do to make something successful. We should point out up front that at this point the amount of tangible information here is quite limited. Now, what kind of domestic mobile robot might Amazon want to make? "People familiar with the project speculate that the Vesta robot could be a sort of mobile Alexa, accompanying customers in parts of their home where they don't have Echo devices."

Amazon's next major consumer product could be far more ambitious than Echo speakers and Fire tablets, according to a new Bloomberg report: The company is said to be working on a domestic robot codenamed "Vesta" after the Roman goddess of family, hearth, and home. Vesta is said to be several years into development, with a release targeted for sometime next year. According to the report, while Vesta's exact purpose is not yet fully known, signs point to it acting as a mobile AI assistant, providing aid by accompanying users to places in their homes that don't have Alexa devices. Vesta prototypes can apparently navigate through homes using autonomous car technologies such as cameras and computer vision, though the robots' sizes and locomotion systems are not specified. Amazon's Lab126 consumer hardware R&D division has hired robotics industry mechanical engineers to aid in the project and is still hiring sensor engineers and robotics software engineers.