We don't yet know if there's life on other worlds, however likely that is, but NASA's Kepler Mission satellite has helped pinpoint the abundance of planets orbiting other stars starting in May 2009. So far, it has provided data that scientists have used to confirm the existence of 2,650 exoplanets in a field of over 150,000 stars that it's examining. But that long service is about to end, as NASA said this week the craft is running out of fuel. From a report: The space agency has put the satellite into a form of hibernation until August 2, when there's time booked on the Deep Space Network -- a global array of receivers for space missions -- to download data from its 18th observational mission. Following that download, NASA will use the remaining fuel to start a 19th session. Fortunately, its successor is already in place and operational. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018, and produced a test image in May. TESS is a massive upgrade, observing almost 400 times the region of space as Kepler, or about 85% of what's observable from its orbit relative to Earth. Kepler is already a survivor, continuing to operate after part of the gyroscope mechanism failed that let it target star fields. Four wheels rotate in the gyroscope to provide a reaction that allows the necessarily precision in tracking, and two of the four failed by May 2013. NASA mission scientists figured out a clever workaround, in which they used pressure from the Sun to provide additional positioning assistance. The mission resumed under the moniker K2 in May 2014.

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London's Metropolitan Police open murder inquiry after 44-year-old woman dies in a hospital in Salisbury.

If JavaScript had the equivalent of WaitNextEvent from the original Mac OS, you could turn it into a decent scripting language. And btw, I love callback hell. I really do. But sometimes you just need to be synchronous, for everything. Including network requests.

Ethiopia and Eritrea leaders share 'brotherly embrace', agree to normalise ties and open their countries' borders.

Two weeks after they went missing, several boys have been rescued from a cave in Thailand.

Earlier this week, ISRO took the first, small but significant step towards realizing human space flight by successfully conducting a test of the Crew Escape System that provides an escape mechanism for astronauts if the launch operation is aborted. From a report: "This is one of the critical technologies for a future human space programme," said K. Sivan, chairman of ISRO. "When you are flying with the humans, if there is something wrong during the launch, this will help them escape to a safe place." Only three countries -- USA, Russia and China -- have human space flight programmes. The only Indian citizen to ever travel to space was fighter pilot Rakesh Sharma who flew aboard Soyuz T-11, a spacecraft of the former USSR in 1984. India does not have a human space flight programme. "ISRO always does research and development activity and develops technologies keeping future needs in mind," said Sivan.

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"Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn't scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on," said Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadMe, who says he has come across a lot of "pseudo-AIs." It's essentially prototyping the AI with human beings, he said. From a report: This practice was brought to the fore this week in a Wall Street Journal article highlighting the hundreds of third-party app developers that Google allows to access people's inboxes. In the case of the San Jose-based company Edison Software, artificial intelligence engineers went through the personal email messages of hundreds of users -- with their identities redacted -- to improve a "smart replies" feature. The company did not mention that humans would view users' emails in its privacy policy. The third parties highlighted in the WSJ article are far from the first ones to do it. In 2008, Spinvox, a company that converted voicemails into text messages, was accused of using humans in overseas call centres rather than machines to do its work. In 2016, Bloomberg highlighted the plight of the humans spending 12 hours a day pretending to be chatbots for calendar scheduling services such as X.ai and Clara. The job was so mind-numbing that human employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots.

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When Jeff Bezos arrives as expected at the Sun Valley conference -- the year's most exclusive meeting of media industry leaders -- he'll know much more about his fellow media moguls than they know about him. And that has them worried, especially as Amazon's advertising business picks up. From a report: Amazon's growing advertising business is poised to challenge the stranglehold Google and Facebook have on the internet's ad dollars, thanks to its growing dominance in e-commerce and growing presence in the media world. Google knows what consumers are interested in, and Facebook knows who you are. But Amazon has what many in the advertising industry regard as the most important piece of the puzzle: what people buy. And the e-commerce giant is starting to capitalize on that data in a big way. "It is definitely growing as a media company, but it is surging in terms of ad revenue," said Advertising Age editor Brian Braiker. "The scary part for marketers is that [data] is all walled off, and if you want the special sauce you have to play by Amazon's rules." Amazon still makes the bulk of its money through the sales of goods and its widely used cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, but its advertising business is growing. In the first three months of 2018, Amazon reported revenue for its "other" segment, which is largely advertising, rose 139 percent, to $2 billion.

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An anonymous reader writes: A popular fitness app that tracks the activity data on millions of users has inadvertently revealed the locations of personnel working at military bases and intelligence services. The app, Polar Flow, built by its eponymous company Polar, a Finnish-based fitness tracking giant with offices in New York, allowed anyone to access a user's fitness activities over several years -- simply by modifying the browser's web address. Although the existence of many government installations are widely known, the identities of their employees were not. Not only was it possible to see exactly where a user had exercised, it was easy to pinpoint exactly where a user lived, if they started or stopped their fitness tracking as soon as they left their house. Because there were no limits on how many requests the reporters could make, coupled with easily enumerable user ID numbers, it was possible for anyone -- including malicious actors or foreign intelligence services -- to scrape the fitness activity data on millions of users. But they also found they could trick the API into retrieving fitness tracking data on private profiles.

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Turkish leader is scheduled to announce his cabinet on Monday, which may result in policy changes in a number of areas.

Army carries out deadly crackdown amid a surge in protests by separatists over the killing of rebel leader Burhani Wani two years ago.

Train, carrying 362 passengers, came off the rails in northwest Turkey due to heavy rains and landslides.

The leftist politician has been in prison since April serving a 12-year sentence in a corruption case.

Beijing trys to boost trade with EU countries after Washington imposed tariffs worth $34bn on Chinese goods.

The women were kidnapped on Saturday when their car broke down on a road linking the Iraqi capital Baghdad to Erbil.