After making a first version available to developers at the end of March 2017, Google is gearing up to offer owners of Nexus (latest generations) and Pixel devices a first beta edition of the upcoming version of its Android mobile operating system.

Music lovers by-and-large agree that there is nothing that can trump the sound of the original instruments built by Antonio Giacomo Stradivari in the late 17th and early 18th century in the Italian town of Cremona. Just over 600 original Stradivarius violins still exist. The master also built numerous violoncellos and violas besides guitars and harps. People have researched and speculated, trying to find out what makes the special tonal qualities of a Stradivarius. There are ample possible explanations: is it, for instance, the special quality of the wood? The trees which the master used for his wood grew during a small ice age in the decades before Stradivari was born. The growth rings in the wood were narrower and the fabric of the wood was denser than in later years as a result.

Are these good times for astrophysics and space exploration? You've spoken about President Kennedy's support for the Apollo mission and that when Nixon cut the funding, the mission was dead. And now President Trump has just recently signed new legislation in support of NASA. Trump says he wants the US to be the first on Mars and that NASA should continue its work. How confident do you feel about that? J. Richard Gott: Time will tell. Realize that I saw Apollo 11 take off. I went to see it, and it was the most amazing thing. Now if you had asked people in 1969 when we would be landing on Mars, they would have all said 1985. 1985! And [Wernher] von Braun had plans to land astronauts on Mars by 1982. Nixon cancelled the program after it landed on the moon; he just cut it off.

All we've got right now is a series of questions. So let's start with what we know. Professor Stephen Hawking, a scientist who has taken in his dotage to making regular fear-inducing pronouncements on the future of human existence, says we have 100 years to leave Earth. That's if artificial intelligence doesn't get us first.

Facebook has launched a British newspaper advertising campaign to warn users of the dangers of fake news, in the latest drive by the social media giant to tackle malicious information ahead of a national election. Facebook has come under intense pressure to tackle the spread of false stories, which came to prominence during the U.S. presidential election last year when many inaccurate posts were widely shared on it and other social media services.

When you purchase a Samsung smartphone and login to your Samsung account on the device you are sent a 30 percent coupon code to purchase an accessory priced at $59.99 or less. I used mine to buy the Galaxy S8 Plus keyboard cover, priced at $59.99 ($42 with 30 percent coupon).

Schultz is professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and has a graduate degree in medicine from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. At Cambridge, Schultz and his colleagues are researching how "rapid, global, evaluative and supervising neural signals may play a role in decision-making and choice behavior." The Danish Lundbeck Foundation have awarded the Brain Prize to Schultz, Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan this year. The award comes with one million Euros in prize money, which the three researchers will share. Schultz, Dayan and Dolan received the prize, because their multidisciplinary work on how learning is related to reward in the human brain is vital for understanding disorders in decision-making.

They are kept deep in the archive of the Max Planck Society in Munich - human brain specimens, elaborately prepared and neatly labeled. Some of the brain specimens belong to Nazi victims. They were murdered because they were mentally ill or disabled and considered "unworthy of life," according to Hitler. About 300,000 people including children were killed in the Nazi's so-called "euthanasia program, T4." But the victims' brains were preserved.

Cheers erupted from SpaceX mission control as one of its Falcon 9 rockets - carrying a classified payload known only as NROL-76 - successfully launched from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida on Monday. It was the first time the aerospace manufacturing company has launched a rocket for the US military - carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, which makes and operates spy satellites for the United States. No details were divulged about the satellite after the launch. Instead, SpaceX focused its webcast on the landing of its first-stage booster.

Mercedes wants to serve as your digital middle man in the sharing economy. Following a successful four-month pilot scheme, the world's leading luxury automotive marque is officially rolling out a new app called Croove, initially in Berlin, that will let anyone rent out their car to anyone. The idea is simple. If you have a car, regardless of make and model and you don't need it all of the time, you can upload it onto the Croove platform alongside what you deem a suitable rental fee.

Samsung and Apple maintained their leadership in the smartphone market in early 2017 while Chinese-based Huawei's strong growth cemented its number three position, a market tracker said Thursday.

At the Hanover Fair, robots and humans are at the center of industrial activity. We're to be collaborators now. The question is: can we ever learn to love robots? DW's Zulfikar Abbany finds a line still clearly drawn. Picture the scene: on the left there's a huge Kawasaki robot housed in a glass cage and on the right, outside and looking in, are two ordinary people, a woman and a man, middle-aged. The woman has shortish grey hair and a bewildered look; the man has long grey hair and a bewildered look. Perhaps they are hippies, the kind who survived and now exist with one foot in the mainstream and another somewhere between here - the 2017 Hanover Fair - and some recurring trip. In any event, they are standing there, observing this huge automated thing, and talking quietly amongst themselves about our human experience with robots.

A German couple is suing because Facebook won't grant them access to their dead daughter's account. The trial, which began in a Berlin court on Tuesday, touches on the complicated issue of digital legacy. Having a child die before you is devastating enough as it is. But a Berlin mother has had to wage a years-long court battle to learn more about her teenage daughter's death. She is suing to gain access to the Facebook account of her daughter, who in 2012 died under unclear circumstances at the age of 15. Tuesday marked the first day of the trial at Berlin's superior court of justice. No verdict has been passed down yet. Judges gave both parties - the deceased girl's parents and social media giant Facebook - two weeks to find a solution outside of court.

It's now time for the real talks to begin - just days after the 7th European Conference on Space Debris ended. And this week's talks will have questions to answer left over from the week before. It was "the most important conference on space debris." You could hear that line bouncing off the walls at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt. But it was just the starter. This week Darmstadt hosts a closed-door, governmental meeting of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). Whether it was planned or not, the IADC is set to discuss a much-needed renewal of international space law, which is, experts admit, rather vague. But how far they will go is anyone's guess.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) released a report on Monday highlighting the recent troubling outbreaks in cases of measles and rubella across the continent, which have resulted in at least 9 fatalies. Two crucial factors could be vaccine skepticism as well as adults being ill-informed about how susceptible they are to the illnesses. The study said that during the January and February 2017, there were more than 1,500 cases of measles in 14 different European countries. The result of "an accumulation of unvaccinated individuals," the report found that some 42 percent of the cases in 2016 were from Romania alone.

The March was first thought up in the US as a response to President Donald Trump's critical attitude toward science. He had previously said that he does not believe in man-made climate change and attempted to influence the public communication of science and environment authorities like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Parks Service. Organizers of the original D.C. march state on their website that the event is the "first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies, and governments." Critics have called out the movement for forcing scientists into the political sphere. But participants in Saturday's D.C. march disagree.

Bose Corp spies on its wireless headphone customers by using an app that tracks the music, podcasts and other audio they listen to, and violates their privacy rights by selling the information without permission, a lawsuit charged.

A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) hailed what it calls "remarkable achievements in tackling neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)" over the past decade, according to a press statement released on Tuesday.

In an attempt to reach a wider sector of customers, Vodafone Egypt launched a new mobile application for blind and visually impaired users called “E3rafli” (an Arabic word for “Find out for me") to help them recognize basic things and services through their mobile phones.

Egypt’s broadband internet speed is reported to be among the slowest in the world, ranking 146 out of 150 countries in total, according to Speedtest market report issued on Thursday that measures internet performance around the world. “[From July to December to 2016,] Egypt ranks 146th out of 150 countries for fixed broadband download speeds and 95th for mobile. In the region of North Africa, Egypt’s fixed broadband was faster than only Libya and the country’s mobile internet was only faster than Algeria and Sudan," the report said.