In the West, we rely on the grid, which provides most people with ample power. In off-grid communities such as those in large parts of rural Africa, energy is a highly valued resource and consumers are much more aware of energy efficiency. The limited energy that is available is disproportionately expensive and innovative solutions, such as small-scale renewable power, that cannot yet compete in the West, are gaining ground where, compared to the cost of the fossil fuels they replace, they are seen as a bargain. Developments such as small solar home systems are bringing power for the first time to millions of off-grid consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to technological advances in LED lights, batteries and mobile payment, creating what many are referring to as the "clean energy revolution" in rural electrification. While LED lighting and phone charging were the first volume application in this rapidly evolving market, consumers of the clean energy revolution in Africa want, and increasingly demand, more. Customers now expect to be able to access the latest technology, media and communications through the growth of the largely familiar pay-as-you-go technology, even in areas where there is no little or no grid access.

Ask not what the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. He presented WIRED with six challenges he feels the tech industry needs to address--just a few earthshaking problems the country could use some help with, that's all. We reached out to six of the biggest names in the WIRED world, and we gave each of them a challenge from the president's list. Then we asked: To get this done, what's the industry's best play? Silicon Valley runs on stories. So does the economy in general. We create what we believe in. If we believe we can use technology to identify and solve big problems, then that's what we'll do.

Anesthesiologists' jobs look safer than radiologists' jobs. In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should?

Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at Thursday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.

Amid Syria's five-year-old civil war and Iraq's push to expel the Islamic State group from its major cities, President Barack Obama has quietly reneged on promises of "no boots on the ground" in recent years. But another American ground battle lingers just outside of the spotlight, in Somalia. A campaign involving private contractors, drone strikes and up to 300 U.S. Special Operations troops against the al Qaeda offshoot group al-Shabab has been escalating there over the past year, the New York Times reported Sunday, citing "senior American military officials." Operations in the country, located in the eastern "Horn of Africa," are expected to expand, according to the Times, on top of efforts that have involved the Navy's SEAL Team 6, weekly raids with troops from nearby Kenya and Uganda and interrogation of prisoners. The American use of force there hasn't exactly been welcome. At the end of September, for instance, Somalia's Security Minister Osman Issa accused the U.S. of killing 22 Somali soldiers in an airstrike, the result of bad intelligence information.

This week in San Diego, Singularity University hosted its annual Exponential Medicine conference. The conference aims to connect the dots between healthcare disciplines and cutting-edge tech by convening medical practitioners, technologists, entrepreneurs, and over 80 expert speakers from the field. It's easy to say "healthcare is broken" and call it a day, but a quote from brilliant thinker Maria Popova reminds us of the power of optimism to create change: There's still considerable work to be done to create more effective healthcare systems in the US and worldwide. That said, at the conference we learned about incredible progress we can both celebrate and focus on moving forward. Healthcare as we've known it for decades is evolving.

Four people were killed, including two children. "We were looking into all these different stories, like the psychology of the drone pilot, all the crazy, messed-up stuff that surrounds it," says Killbox programmer Albert Elwin on the IndieCade show floor in Los Angeles. "It's all really dark and depressing -- it's absolutely in some ways a difficult project to work on because you get kind of consumed by the reality of it." Since 2004, the US has conducted more than 400 drone strikes across Pakistan alone that have killed up to 4,000 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Hard statistics don't exist in the world of UAV warfare, but the Bureau estimates between 423 and 965 civilians have been killed in unmanned strikes on Pakistan, including as many as 207 children.

A new age is dawning. Whether it is a wonderful one or a terrible one remains to be seen. Look around and the signs of dizzying technological progress are difficult to miss. Driverless cars and drones, not long ago the stuff of science fiction, are now oddities that can occasionally be spotted in the wild and which will soon be a commonplace in cities around the world. With a few flicks of a finger, we can use our phones to order up a meal, or a car, or a translation for a waiter's query in a foreign country. Gadgets such as the Amazon Echo are finding their way into living rooms, where they sit listening, ready to comply with a voice command. Just a few years ago, one could dismiss the digital age as consisting of little more than social networks and cat videos; no longer.

With the advent of large-scale whole-genome variation data, population geneticists are currently interested in considering increasingly more complex models. However, statistical inference in this setting is a challenging task, as computing the likelihood of a complex population genetic model is a difficult problem both theoretically and computationally. In this paper, we introduce a novel likelihood-free inference framework for population genomics by applying deep learning, which is an active area of machine learning research. To our knowledge, deep learning has not been employed in population genomics before. A recent survey article [1] provides an accessible introduction to deep learning, and we provide a high-level description below.

Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at yesterday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.