CBS Sci-fi drama Extant explores a world where human-level artificial intelligence is a reality. Centered on the Woods family, it follows astronaut Molly (Halle Berry), who finds herself pregnant after a year alone in space, husband and genius roboticist John (Goran Visnjic), and their son Ethan, a robot and the most advanced AI ever created.

Wired.co.uk caught up with creator Mickey Fisher and showrunner Greg Walker to discuss Extant's creation, how to build a realistic future, using tech to foster personal connections and partnering with Steven Spielberg.

Wired.co.uk: How long had you been working on Extant before you got people like Halle Berry and Steven Spielberg involved?

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These aren't our illustrious orbiting sex geckos, but they are the experiment's ground-based control sex geckos, and that's almost as good! imbp.ru

Good news, everyone: according to a statement from the Russian space agency Roscosmos, positive control has been reestablished over the agency’s orbiting Foton-M4 satellite. Launched a week ago, Foton-M4 carries a primarily biological payload made up of geckos, flies, plant seeds, and various microorganisms.

The satellite made headlines late last week when just a few days after launch, ground control lost communication with the satellite and could no longer send it commands.

As of Saturday night, the crisis appears to be over, and Roscosmos can once again talk to Foton-M4. "The link is established, the prescribed commands have been conducted in accordance with the plan," confirmed Roscosmos' chief official Oleg Nikolayevich Ostapenko. According to an additional quote from Ostapenko on RT.com, Roscosmos is sure that "90 percent" of the satellite’s experiments are still viable.

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Up to 230,000 Ukrainians have had to flee their homes because of intense fighting in the east of the country.

A woman and her baby had a lucky escape, when they narrowly avoided being involved in a car accident in San Francisco.

The airline of Dubai's government is flying huge amounts of aid to Gaza.

France's president has promised that the bodies of 118 people who died when an Air Algerie plane crashed in Mali will be brought to France.

Israel has accepted a UN request for a 24-hour ceasefire in Gaza, but warns the army will act if it is breached by Palestinian militants.

Bose Corp. filed a lawsuit on Friday that accuses popular headphone maker Beats Electronics of infringing upon several of its patents.

The suit claims that Bose lost sales because Beats—which Apple announced it would acquire for $3 billion in May—used patented noise-cancelling technology in its Studio and Studio Wireless headphone lines.

Beats’ products that allegedly use the technology “can also be used for noise cancellation when no music is played, a feature that Beats also advertises,” the suit states. “Thus, Beats specifically encourages users to use the infringing functionality. Beats advertises no method to turn off features that cause end users to directly infringe.”

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French police fired tear gas as clashes broke out at a banned pro-Palestinian demonstration on Saturday, as thousands defied a ban on the protest.

Earlier this week, fighters from the Sunni extremist group Isis blew up a well-known shrine in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

theGreenCabbage asks:

I am interested in implementing a free trial version to my existing software. I plan on having the trial last 14 days. Upon the 14th day, my software would prompt the user to either pay for the paid version, or have the consequence of not being able to use it. The free trial version is entirely unlocked, meaning all paid features are there.

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Beamsplitters like these are enough to confirm that single photons can be linearly polarized. Fermilab

One of the joys of the arXiv is that anyone can submit anything to the website. Cranks and kooks can publish to their hearts' content in the theoretical physics section. Their work will remain there, read only by those searching for casual amusement. Yet somewhere between all the excellent science and slapstick comedy are scientists who just get stuff flat out wrong.

This is the story of how two respected physicists failed to understand photon angular momentum. Don't worry, they're not alone. Every physicist who has given the subject any thought has lost sleep working it out (and has had nightmares involving Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics). Since I lost sleep over it, I figured I would ensure that you all lose some sleep too.

Spinning photons and rotating electric fields

The fundamental confusion arises from the fact that there are two equivalent ways of describing the angular momentum of a photon. A cursory inspection of nature, however, seems to reveal that one is more natural than the other.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Chrome Beta for Android updated recently, and with the update came a Material Design makeover, the new design style Google introduced at I/O. It's easy to think of a browser as "just an address bar," but this new version of Chrome has a ton of changes, including a slick new incognito mode design, a flatter icon, and an overall cleaner and brighter look. Just click through the gallery below for an overview.

In a blog post announcing the update, Google says the new version of Chrome "is starting to sport some of the elements of Material Design," indicating that the redesign isn't finished yet. While it looks like most of the immediate stuff is finished, like the new tab page, address bar, menu, and incognito mode, some areas, like the settings, haven't changed at all.

In addition to the new look, Chrome Beta 37 will now support automatically signing in across multiple accounts. The changelog also lists "performance improvements," and on the Android L developer preview especially, this new version is fast, even when scrolling. The version also fixed a bug where Chrome 36 would identify Android L as "Android 4.3" (that's Jelly Bean), the beta corrects that and identifies L as "4.4.99."

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Millions of people could face starvation unless more is done to stave off a looming famine in South Sudan, UNICEF and the World Food Programme have warned.

Artist's impression of the huge impact that deformed the protoplanetary asteroid Vesta, leaving the large impact basin we see today. Martin Jutzi

A new study shows that the asteroid 4 Vesta may have a different internal structure than previously thought. Vesta, the second largest body in the asteroid belt after the dwarf planet Ceres, is notable for two gigantic craters, so big that they partly overlap despite being on opposite poles of the asteroid.

The first, chronologically speaking, is called Venenia (Named for a priestess of the goddess Vesta in Roman mythology), the result of an impact some 2 billion years ago. The crater is 395 kilometers in diameter, but only penetrated about 25 kilometers deep into the surface of Vesta. And then there’s Rheasilvia. Also named for a priestess of Vesta, Rheasilvia is a whopping 505 km in diameter (Vesta is only 525km in diameter), and the rim of the crater is also one of the tallest mountains in the solar system. Rheasilvia was probably created about one billion years ago, and it obliterated part of Venenia where the two overlap.

The impact penetrated so deep that it’s thought to reach down through the asteroid’s crust to its mantle. The new study, however, shows that, while it did reach about 60-100 km, it did not penetrate to the mantle, suggesting the mantle begins deeper than previously thought.

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Brick-a-Pic lets you convert your photos into Lego artworks. Upload a picture, and the company will send you a brick mosaic picture with precisely the right pieces selected from the Lego color palette. You can then assemble the pictures according to a handy guide.

Clearly it's already possible to create pictures from Lego if you have the brick skillz. But Brick-a-Pic automates the process. It has developed a piece of software that converts your image into appropriately sized pixels using only official Lego colors and those colors that Lego used to produce but has discontinued. It then sends you the correct number of bricks of the different colors you need to produce your artwork.

Kits come in a range of sizes, from 16x16 pixels (up to 256 Lego bricks) through to 48x48 pixels (up to 2,304 bricks). If you are feeling really extravagant you can go all out with a custom mosaic which can be any size and comes with up to 5,000 bricks.

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For a while now, I’ve realized that there is a massive gap in the continuity of smartphone display history. Until the last few months of 2011 and early 2012, proper testing of smartphone displays was few and far between. Most websites tested peak brightness and contrast, and possibly white point. While some websites did go in depth, they would often only test a few phones. Of course, now things are different. Websites are starting to scrutinize display quality from all angles from color accuracy to reflectance, but no one has ever gone back to properly test old devices.

To find out how they performed, read on.

Nigeria's health minister has confirmed that Ebola caused the death of a Liberian man who died in quarantine in Lagos.

Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) say they have taken over a large Syrian army base on the outskirts of the city of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria.

Always on their phones, those teens. Channel 4

A new reality series airing on Channel 4 used rigged iPhones to monitor all the digital activities of its teen characters, wrote the Columbia Journalism Review on Thursday. The system, referred to as a "digital rig" by the studio that developed it, had feeds monitored by a production team 13 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Secret Life of Students was a four-part documentary series meant to portray the lives of 12 freshmen as they navigated the first four months of college. In addition to filming the students, the production studio, Raw TV, also thought it would be a good idea to track the students' activity on their phones, including Internet search history, Twitter usage, texts, and phone calls.

While the entire program, phone use included, seems to have fallen a little flat, it produced some interesting moments. "Is chlamydia permanent?" one subject searched on her phone after finding out during a phone call, which was also recorded on the rigged phones, that she might have contracted it from another subject .

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