N-Star generated jet of material shot outward at nearly speed of light.

Curse of the Pharaohs took me by surprise. I didn't really think twice about putting it off--usually Assassin's Creed DLC is filler, an indulgence I save for the quieter parts of the year. It's an excuse to jump back in for 5 or 10 hours, and in the case of Assassin's Creed: Origins I planned to spend some extra time mopping up side content I'd skipped. I played through it recently though and quickly found out Curse of the Pharaohs is legitimately fantastic. Set four years after the main game, Curse of the Pharaohs sends Bayek up the Nile to the ancient city of Thebes and the nearby Valley of the Kings.

It's one of the first things you notice when you look at archaic human relatives in a natural history textbook or museum. Just above the eyes rests an imposing feature, a prominent brow ridge that juts out above the eye sockets. But why did many of our distant relatives have this distinct facial feature? Why don't we have it anymore? Over the years, scientists have suggested plenty of solutions.

Leading South African law firm, Webber Wentzel, has announced it has chosen legal AI company Luminance to provide doc review services for M&A transactions. This is the latest in a series of client wins for the UK-based AI company, which last week also announced it had partnered with Sweden's Delphi and also Luxembourg's Arendt & Medernach. In the latter case the Benelux firm will be making use of Luminance's new real estate document review capacity. Until recently the company had been focused on M&A due diligence work. In a statement Webber Wentzel said it'particularly values the platform's built-in collaboration tools which will allow its lawyers to quickly group and assign documents, track live progress, and significantly reduce the amount of time spent organising workflow'.

When Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance succumbed to the Antarctic pack ice on November 21, 1915, he and his crew began one of the most gruelling survival attempts in history. Since the explorer led his 27 men to safety more than a century ago, there has been no sign of the ship. But now, in an echo of the golden age of exploration, the race is on to the Antarctic once more – as two rival expeditions hunt for the lost vessel. A British-led team from Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, along with universities in South Africa and New Zealand, plans to launch autonomous underwater vehicles almost two miles under the ice. The multi-million pound expedition will set out in January 2019 in research ship SA Agulhas II, The Times reported.

Chinese tech and entertainment-oriented conglomerate Tencent Holdings is collaborating with the London-based health app developer Babylon Health, founded in 2013, to introduce medical chatbot AI capabilities into their solutions. While the press release from Babylon Health does not go into detail about the target scenario, Financial Times writer Aliya Ram suggests that the technology will directly go into Tencent's social messaging platform WeChat. No financial details on the deal have been disclosed. WeChat itself could be considered a hybrid of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter from a functional point of view. Even though they are primarily used only in China, with their 1 billion monthly active users they can be considered as one of the world's most popular communication platforms.

When we think about artificial intelligence and the "world of the future," our vision is usually more Jetsons than Green Acres. But for Dr. Ranveer Chandra, a Principal Researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research, rural farms are the perfect place to realize the benefits of AI through what he calls precision agriculture, or data-driven farming. Today, in a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Chandra talks about how his research may eventually make your wi-fi signal stronger and your battery life longer, but also shares the story of how spending childhood summers with his grandparents in rural India inspired a line of research that could change the face of farming and help meet the food and nutrition needs of a growing global population. Ranveer Chandra: One of the latest projects I'm doing is Farm Beats. And for that, to actually see how well your research works, you need to be out there in a farm. I'm like, "What am I doing going out there in the farm in the middle of nowhere in this rain?" But on the other hand, just reminding yourself that if this research works, this is going to benefit so many farmers. It gives you that level of energy to keep going, to keep thinking about doing bigger things and not stopping where you are. A show that brings you closer to the cutting edge of technology research and the scientists behind it. When we think about artificial intelligence and the world of the future, our vision is usually more Jetsons than Green Acres. But for Dr. Ranveer Chandra, a Principal Researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research, rural farms are the perfect place to realize the benefits of AI through what he calls precision agriculture or data-driven farming. Today, in a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Chandra talks about how his research may eventually make your Wi-Fi signal stronger and your battery life longer. But also shares the story of how spending childhood summers with his grandparents in rural India inspired a line of research that could change the face of farming, and help meet the food and nutrition needs of a growing global population. Host: Ranveer Chandra, welcome to the podcast, it's great to see you today. Ranveer Chandra: Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. And it says on the website that you develop technologies that "expand the state of the art in computing." Ranveer Chandra: I come from a networking background.

Campaigners are renewing calls for a pre-emptive ban on so-called "killer robots" as representatives of more than 80 countries meet to discuss the autonomous weapons systems. The use of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) is "a step too far", said Mary Wareham, the global coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. "They cross a moral line, because we would see machines taking human lives on the battlefield or in law enforcement. "We want weapon systems and the use of force to remain under human control," Wareham said. Wareham spoke to Al Jazeera before Monday's meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on a possible ban on LAWS. This is the fifth international meeting to discuss so-called "killer robots" since 2014, but no formal decisions will be taken yet as countries are still working towards a common definition of LAWS, and have yet to agree on whether they should be outlawed in international law. This is going to be a crucial year. If we do not move swiftly, we could end up in a situation where it's too late and where fully autonomous weapons proliferate to the extent that every country has them," Wareham told Al Jazeera.

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world's population, went hungry in 2016. That number seems to be rising. Poverty is not the only reason, however, people are experiencing food insecurity. "Increasingly we're also seeing hunger caused by the displacement related to conflict, natural disaster as well, but particularly there's been an uptick in the number of people displaced in the world," said Robert Opp, director of Innovation and Change Management at the United Nations World Food Program. Humanitarian organizations are turning to new technologies such as AI, or artificial intelligence, to fight global food insecurity.

In coming tutorials on this blog I will be dealing with how to create deep learning models that predict text sequences. However, before we get to that point we have to understand some key Natural Language Processing (NLP) ideas. One of the key ideas in NLP is how we can efficiently convert words into numeric vectors which can then be "fed into" various machine learning models to perform predictions. The current key technique to do this is called "Word2Vec" and this is what will be covered in this tutorial. After discussing the relevant background material, we will be implementing Word2Vec embedding using TensorFlow (which makes our lives a lot easier). To get up to speed in TensorFlow, check out my TensorFlow tutorial. Also, if you prefer Keras – check out my Word2Vec Keras tutorial.