A Saudi-led coalition has launched air raids on Yemen's Hodeidah, in an apparent resumption of military operations on the strategic Red Sea city after Houthi rebels attacked two Saudi oil tankers and one of the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) main airports. The Houthi-run al-Masirah TV said in a series of tweets on Friday that coalition air strikes had targeted a radio station inside the city and a fishing pier. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The latest offensive on the port city of Hodeidah came a day after Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Abu Dhabi's international airport. According to the Al-Masirah television channel, the Sammad-3 drone launched three attacks on the airport.

An egg bank in Spain is using face recognition technology to match people with donors who look like them. The idea is that this way prospective mothers will get a child who resembles them even though they are not genetically related. Egg donation is relatively common in Spain compared to other European nations. It has strict laws protecting the anonymity of the donor, which makes it a popular destination for women across Europe seeking eggs for IVF.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans are afraid to ride in self-driving cars, according to the latest survey by the American Automobile Association. There is bad news ahead for the many automobile and technology companies currently developing, and road-testing, self-driving cars: many people are too frightened to ride in driverless vehicles. The American Automobile Association (AAA) May consumer trust survey on autonomous vehicles (AVs) found that 73% of U.S. citizens now fear traveling in an AV, compared with 63% just six months before. In addition, the survey found that two-thirds of millennials--a supposedly tech-loving generation--are also too fearful to ride in self-driving cars. The AAA even has unwelcome news from pedestrians and cyclists, with nearly two-thirds saying they don't trust AVs enough to use roads and sidewalks alongside them.

Amazon touts its Rekognition facial recognition system as "simple and easy to use," encouraging customers to "detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases." And yet, in a study released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the technology managed to confuse photos of 28 members of Congress with publicly available mug shots. Given that Amazon actively markets Rekognition to law enforcement agencies across the US, that's simply not good enough. The ACLU study also illustrated the racial bias that plagues facial recognition today. "Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition's false matches in our test were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress," wrote ACLU attorney Jacob Snow.

Voice-enabled smart devices is set to be the new game changer in consumers' lives.Andria Cheng Amazon has made Alexa practically a household name as the voice-assistant-enabled Fire TV stick and Echo devices rank among its best sellers and gives the online giant a dominant lead in the growing smart speaker market. But you'd be wrong to think that lead came just from those big discounts Amazon gave on the likes of Prime Day. On the campus of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark on Tuesday, 2,500 developers, marketers, executives and other attendees from Panasonic and Lego to Capital One and Johnson & Johnson gathered for the three-day inaugural Voice Summit. While Amazon rivals like Microsoft and Google were also among attendees, the Seattle giant's presence was not to be missed: it's the event's largest sponsor among dozens. At the conference, which ends Thursday, attendees could hang out with Amazon Alexa staff and learn to code and ask questions, besides listening to various Amazon executives talking about the direction of voice and learning about Alexa initiatives across industries from retail and education to finance and healthcare.

Waymo self-driving cars will be used to chauffeur "early riders" to and from their Walmart online grocery pickup location. Waymo self-driving cars will be used to chauffeur "early riders" to and from their Walmart online grocery pickup location. The future is here and soon it will be toting grocery shoppers around Phoenix. Walmart and Waymo -- formerly Google's self-driving car project -- announced on Wednesday the launch of a pilot program that will allow consumers to make their grocery pickups with the help of an autonomous vehicle. Participants in Waymo's "early riders" program will be able to take a driverless shuttle service to and from Walmart whenever they purchase groceries from Walmart.com using the retailer's online grocery pickup service.

In June of last year, five researchers at Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research unit published an article showing how bots can simulate negotiation-like conversations. While for the most part the bots were able to maintain coherent dialogue, the researchers found that the software agents would occasionally generate strange sentences like: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to." On seeing these results, the team realized that they had failed to include a constraint that limited the bots to generating sentences within the parameters of spoken English, meaning that they developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves. These findings were considered to be fairly interesting by other experts in the field, but not totally surprising or groundbreaking. A month after this initial research was released, Fast Company published an article entitled AI Is Inventing Language Humans Can't Understand.

Foreign Minister Taro Kono agreed Wednesday with his German counterpart to promote free trade amid a rising protectionist tide, while supporting a rules-based international order. During talks in Tokyo, Kono and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stressed the importance of closer economic ties just days after the signing of a free trade agreement between Japan and the European Union. "The free, open and rules-based international order faces a serious challenge," Kono said during a joint press briefing with Maas. "Closer cooperation between Japan and Germany, (countries) that share the same values such as democracy, and lead Asia and Europe … is taking on greater importance than ever." The signing earlier this month of the free trade deal, which covers about a third of the world's economy, has been seen as symbolic of the concerted effort to counter the increasingly protectionist steps taken by U.S. President Donald Trump.

They can unload the dishwasher, deliver packages to your home and open doors. Their thin, metallic legs are able to traverse a steep flight of stairs -- or crawl straight into your worst nightmares. Now Boston Dynamics' awkward, four-legged, doglike robot, SpotMini, is evolving from a YouTube sensation to a purchasable pet of sorts, according to the company's founder, Marc Raibert. Raibert told an audience last month at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany, that his company is already testing SpotMini with potential customers from four separate industries: security, delivery, construction and home assistance. His presentation at the expo was reported by Inverse.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.