It was an historic week as Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to be the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party for the highest office of the most powerful country on Earth. Meanwhile, we're reviewing another debate about where Seattle's startup ecosystem ranks nationally; new data on urban startup clusters; a 15 million funding round for BitTitan; Bill Gates' poultry program; news of artificial intelligence watching and writing sci-fi films; and a good read on how "Silicon Valley" delivers such an accurate satire of the real Silicon Valley. It doesn't rank as high as NYC, LA, or Boston in the number of startups funded or capital invested. So on a dollars in/dollars [out], Seattle outperforms. The perennial debate about who's No. 2 (always behind Silicon Valley) is tiresome, but look, here I am writing about it. One really good thing to come out of this is Tren Griffin's essay at GeekWire on what it takes for a city to develop a top-tier tech and startup ecosystem.

Sending packages by airplane is nothing new, but the task could soon be taken over by drones. DHL recently completed of a three-month-long test of its automated drone delivery system, the Parcelcopter. It works with a combination helipad and mailbox dubbed Skyport, which can automatically load and unload the drone's payload when it lands and store it in one of the station's lockers. Testing took place between January and March of 2016 in Bavaria, Germany. The idea was to see if the drone could be used to deliver packages to areas that are remote and where standard delivery takes a long time.

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings.[1] It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but is more easily reversed than the state of hibernation or of being comatose. Mammalian sleep occurs in repeating periods, in which the body alternates between two highly distinct modes known as non-REM and REM sleep. REM stands for "rapid eye movement" but involves many other aspects including virtual paralysis of the body. During sleep, most systems in an animal are in an anabolic state, building up the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. Sleep in non-human animals is observed in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and some fish, and, in some form, in insects and even in simpler animals such as nematodes. The internal circadian clock promotes sleep daily at night in diurnal species (such as humans) and in the day in nocturnal organisms (such as rodents). However, sleep patterns vary widely among animals and among different individual humans. Industrialization and artificial light have substantially altered human sleep habits in the last 100 years.[2] The diverse purposes and mechanisms of sleep are the subject of substantial ongoing research.[3] Sleep seems to assist animals with improvements in the body and mind. A well-known feature of sleep in humans is the dream, an experience typically recounted in narrative form, which resembles waking life while in progress, but which usually can later be distinguished as fantasy. Sleep is sometimes confused with unconsciousness, but is quite different in terms of thought process. Humans may suffer from a number of sleep disorders. These include dyssomnias (such as insomnia, hypersomnia, and sleep apnea), parasomnias (such as sleepwalking and REM behavior disorder), bruxism, and the circadian rhythm sleep disorders. In mammals and birds, sleep is divided into two broad types: rapid eye movement (REM sleep) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM or non-REM sleep). Each type has a distinct set of physiological and neurological features associated with it. REM sleep is associated with dreaming, desynchronized and faster brain waves, loss of muscle tone,[4] and suspension of homeostasis[citation needed]. REM and non-REM sleep are so different that physiologists classify them as distinct behavioral states. In this view, REM, non-REM, and waking represent the three major modes of consciousness, neural activity, and physiological regulation.[5] According to the Hobson & McCarley activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed in 1975–1977, the alternation between REM and non-REM can be explained in terms of cycling, reciprocally influential neurotransmitter systems.[6]

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. "I've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy," Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations "indistinguishable from reality" was inevitable.

CAIRO – A vessel with an underwater robot arrived in Egypt on Thursday and is set to begin searching the Mediterranean for the wreck of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, authorities said. The John Lethbridge research vessel, which Egypt has hired from the Deep Ocean Search company, would begin combing the seabed on Friday in the crash zone between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt. What caused the Airbus A320 operating Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to go down on May 19, killing all 66 people on board, remains a mystery. The vessel, whose equipment can locate and retrieve black boxes from the seabed, arrived in Alexandria on Thursday, said Egypt's civil aviation authority. "The aircraft accident investigation committee for MS804 was at the port upon the arrival of the vessel," the authority said in a statement.

A vial of blood is small, fragile, and vital. In the days and weeks following an earthquake, or in the early stages of an epidemic, a sample of blood, properly tested, can save lives. That of the patient and, if a disease is noticed and handled before it spreads, that of many others. Drones, from ship to shore and then shore back to ship, may be the answer. Later this month, drone delivery service Flirtey, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine pathologist Dr. Timothy Amukele, plans to test ship-to-shore drone delivery in Cape May, New Jersey, on June 23rd.

The Egypt Air disaster may have dropped out of the news briefly, but the investigation continues apace to find out why flight MS804 crashed. French investigators think they have heard locator-beacon signals from at least one of the "black box" flight recorders, and now salvage experts are heading to the site to take a closer look. Hearing the beacons is one thing, but they won't know for sure what they have found until they send down a robotic submarine armed with bright lights and cameras. "Black boxes" are, in fact, bright orange and have reflective strips, so they show up pretty well when you shine lights on them. The robotic submarine is on a special salvage ship, called the John Lethbridge.

When IBM's deep blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997, researchers thought it would take computers decades to beat humans at Go: a 2000 year old board game and even as early as last year, researchers thought we were at least 10 years away. But in early 2016, Google's DeepMind, using advances in Deep Learning, beat Lee Sedol the world champion of Go. In addition to games, Deep Learning is opening new business opportunities in various areas which were simply not possible a few years back. Come listen to leaders from Nervana Systems, Natural Selection, Mtell, and Netradyne who will be sharing their personal experiences of starting an AI company, opportunities that exist for starting AI based businesses and lessons learned throughout their career. Alex has a decade of experience in large-scale machine learning and the industrial IoT.

The newest weapon in the fight against wildlife poaching and illegal logging doesn't rely solely on boots or bullets, but on a computer software application driven by artificial intelligence. Called Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, or PAWS, the app uses algorithms – similar to the mathematical models used to power computer games – to devise strategies for defeating those who seek to destroy nature. Thousands of animals are illegally slaughtered each year for their ivory, skin and bones for use in traditional medicines and feeding black market demand, while others meet their death at the hands of illicit trophy hunters, in what the World Wildlife Fund refers to as "a global poaching crisis." Last year alone, around 30,000 elephants and a record 1,338 rhinos were killed in Africa, while tens of thousands of other animals were poached and trafficked, "feeding an illegal wildlife trade that is increasingly being driven by international organized crime," the international conservation group said in a recent statement. Developed in 2013 and still in the test phase, the PAWS software analyzes data on terrain, topography, routes most frequently used by animals and paths traveled by poachers, said Milind Tambe, a computer scientist and professor of industrial systems engineering at USC who developed the technology with his doctoral students, including Fei Fang and Thanh Nguyen.

I'm hanging out with my 4-year-old daughter in the early evening, trying to keep her entertained and pull dinner together, when my phone buzzes. Normally I'd feel guilty for checking it immediately, and distracted even if I didn't. It's a timely suggestion from an app called Muse. Here's what it says: "Try playing'Simon Says' with L,. using directional words like: behind, around, between. 'Simon Says stand between the chairs.')" I can even call out the commands while chopping vegetables.