Machines have been outperforming the human brain for a while now. Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov, Watson vs. Ken Jennings, Siri vs. my hungover inability to operate technology. Now IBM's Blue Gene is trying to not just outperform, but simulate the whole damn human brain. It's 4.5 percent of the way there.

If you saw the second night of Jeopardy's Watson vs Man and Watson's flat out dominance, I wouldn't blame you for being a little bit sad about humanity. Thankfully it's not straight to SkyNet for Watson, turns out the machine is a little unreliable and prone to crashes.

If you happened to miss out on the first half of Round 1 last night, shame on you. You can catch up here.

Here, an Egyptian man takes a break from a hard day of protesting to catch a catnap. Inside the tread of a tank. I hope he doesn't wake up on the wrong side of the bed (under the tank). [Atlantic]

Computers that can beat chess grandmasters? Ho-hum. The new arena where artificial intelligence and humans face off is StarCraft.

To promote his book Dot Robot: Atomic Swarm, children's author Jason Bradbury built a replica of one of the characters, Punk. The only trouble is that—with some CGI help—the spiky, spherical robot turned against his creator.

At the Hanover zoo, an orangutan must pull a succession of strings before being rewarded with a nut. Sometimes, the experience gets a bit frustrating:

According to the the description, the man in this video is an engineering student in Pakistan. Anyone remember that old Far Side comic?

Science fiction is great fun, but should we really be quaking in our boots over dangerous A.I. anytime soon? A growing number of scientists say yes, and the results of their February conference at Asilomar are finally being made public.

Did you ever read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle? Yeah, things haven't changed as much as we would like to think.