Machine learning has come a long way since Hollywood painted it as shiny robots fueled by artificial intelligence. In the Hollywood version, robots usually end up replacing humans. But today, we're actually using machine learning to supplement many of the things that humans do best. They feel foreign, scientific, and hard to understand. And for many professionals, the phrase still sounds like highly technical jargon.

Stealth bombers and armed drones launched airstrikes Wednesday night against two Islamic State encampments in northern Libya in an expansion of the air war there, according to the Pentagon. The attacks were authorized by President Obama two days before he leaves office and are a reminder of the continuing turmoil in the oil-rich nation where a U.S.-led air war helped insurgents overthrow strongman Moammar Kadafi in 2011. Islamic State militants in Libya have established what officials say is the group's largest and most powerful affiliate outside its core areas in Syria and Iraq, although its area of control has shrunk considerably over the last year. B-2 bombers targeted two desert camps about 30 miles southwest of Surt, a port city on the central Mediterranean coast that U.S.-backed Libyan forces recaptured last year from the militants. U.S. officials said dozens of militants had escaped from Surt to the desert camps.

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" -- providing documents relevant to a lawsuit -- the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans. The incredible new footage reveals a female great ape using a saw to skilfully divide a branch in two. The talented ape uses her right hand to hold the tool and her feet to grip the tree branch like a vice. She even blows away the sawdust to inspect her work like a true craftsman. An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans.

January 18, 2017 --Barren circles dot the dry grasslands across about 1,500 miles of the Namib Desert stretching down the southwestern coast of Africa, emerging, growing, shrinking, and disappearing in lifetimes of 30 to 60 years. The empty patches are accentuated by a rim of particularly tall grasses that ring the circles, which range from 6 feet to 115 feet wide. The fairy circles, as the strange bare soil spots are called, have long puzzled scientists. Although they look a bit like imprints left by massive raindrops, impacting meteors, or as legend would have it, the feet of gods, researchers suspect the pattern may form as a result of a more systematic natural process. But just what that process might be has been the subject of much debate.

To the average person, it may seem that the biggest technology advances of 2015 were the larger smartphone screens and small app updates. But a lot more happened than that. A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven't seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. In the developed world, we have become used to having devices that connect and inform us and provide services on demand, and the developing world has largely been in the dark.

An octopus likes to be wined and dined during sex. A study looking at the larger Pacific striped octopus shows that, unlike most octopuses, the male and female face each other when mating – a pose that may allow them to feed together at the same time (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134152). Now glasses can hide you from prying eyes. A team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics has developed a pair of glasses whose patterning foils face recognition software. The Privacy Visor is expected to go on sale in June 2016 for about $240.

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram's 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that--if it panned out--would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain--from synapses to hemispheres--and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. In the four years since Markram's speech, he hasn't backed off a nanometer. The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety--from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness--is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them.

Compiled by Carl Zimmer (zimmer@panix.com) Natural Language Laboratory, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia Researchers are devising "relaxed grammars" to extract the sense of transcribed speech through a method known as "partial parsing," which deciphers chunks of language rather than breaking down the structure of entire sentences. Their work is being integrated into closed-captioning technology for real-time TV translations. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

As the US war machine develops a digital air force of "unmanned aerial vehicles," it's only a matter of time before fighter planes without fighter jocks joust in some robot dogfight in the sky. "Tumbleweeds cleared" reads the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of the nature of local enterprise. This is the desert east of Palmdale, California, center of the US high-tech aerospace industry. To the north is Edwards Air Force Base and nearby, Air Force Plant 42, where Northrop hatched the B-2 bomber. A few hundred yards away is Lockheed Skunk Works, birthplace of the F-117 stealth fighter. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. But now I'm driving past old ranches with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, beneath a sky as wide as the plain, looking for a very different kind of airplane.