The Zip aircraft is made by Bay Area startup Zipline, which will begin drone delivery of blood and medicine to remote Rwandan clinics later this year. SAN FRANCISCO-- How's this for a flight plan to get a drone delivery service financially aloft? Carry cargo that's of live-saving importance, fly long-range fixed-wing aircraft in uncongested skies, and score a government as your first client. That's the atypical approach being taken by Zipline, a Bay Area startup that has raised 18 million in funding from the likes of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and others. Companies such as Amazon and DHL are testing four-propeller helicopter (or quadcopter) drones for consumer goods deliveries in first world countries as lawmakers debate regulations governing such craft.

As of February 1st, Nvidia has announced five finalists to compete for its 2016 Global Impact Award, a yearly 150,000 research grant that goes to any researcher or institution that has used Nvidia GPU technology to make a positive social or humanitarian impact. This year's finalist teams come from Stanford University, Imperial College London, George Mason University, Duke University and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology. Stanford finalist: "GPUs Help Map Worldwide Poverty" One of the five selected finalists this year is machine learning expert Stefano Ermon, who partnered with food security specialists David Lobell, Marshall Burke and some Stanford engineering students for their work in using GPU-accelerated deep learning to turn regular Google Earth images into statistical poverty models. The team trained a neural network to accurately predict poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa from satellite image features like roads, farmlands and homes. "There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which the most recent data we have is 20 years old, so we're still extrapolating from early '90s estimates," says Ermon.

An international coalition of media outlets publishes what it says is an extensive investigation into the offshore financial dealings of the rich and famous. The EU agency that's responsible for processing asylum seekers has less than a tenth of the 2,300 officers that it needs to do the job. He's calling for the Ohio governor, who has won only his home state, to drop out of the GOP presidential race. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, speaking in Cairo during a congressional tour of the region, says that Congress will continue to play a primary role in foreign policy "regardless of what Mr. Trump says or does." The accident just south of Philadelphia kills two Amtrak workers and sends more than 30 passengers to the hospital.

ISIS has created training videos to teach millions of aspiring muslims who dream of becoming'heroic' mujahideens how they can turn cats into self-driving bomb machines and create missiles from shells to shoot down passenger planes – and all from basic materials that can be acquired and purchased anywhere. Put this into perspective: the EU has deliberately sent navy ships to import 1.3 million muslims from the coast of Libya and Turkey of which a massive majority support and endorse jihad according to polls, to now walk the streets all across Europe. In addition, the EU has rewarded Turkey for their willing participation in infiltrating jihad into Syria and Europe by promising to offer them 3bn euros and quicker EU-entry rather than penalizing Turkey. Obama has opened the door to over 100,000 of the same jihad aspiring muslims per year to walk American streets, hating Americans, aspiring for their death and destruction. Meanwhile both the Obama administration ( 46.6 billion for fiscal 2015) and the EU memberstates (over 3.3bn euros in 2010) have been selling military equipment and weapons to muslim countries which are then quickly funneled by these governments to their jihad'heroes' around the world fighting for Allah.

Today, Facebook has apologised for a Safety Check error that led to people around the world being texted in the wake of the Sunday's bombing in Lahore, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite has lost communication with Earth, Microsoft has issued a formal explanation for the actions of its short-lived machine learning chatbot, Tay, and more. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. In the wake of a suicide bombing that left at least 69 people dead in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday, Facebook has apologised for an error in its Safety Check disaster response system that saw people around the world being asked to check in as safe (The Guardian). Users in areas as geographically diverse as Australia, Egypt and Belgium received text messages asking if they'd been affected by the explosion, without any information on where the incident had occurred.

Moviemakers excel at recreating violence and gore on screen. But Will Self asks if we should view fictional violence with more caution. When I was younger I equated viewing such things (and viewing actors performing sexual acts) with some sort of liberty - an existential freedom to be the virile fellow I felt myself to be, and a universal freedom to witness human expression in all its polymorphous perversity. But with age - and possibly, I concede, declining virility - I began to see that pornography entailed the exploitation of vulnerable and mostly young people, while the depictions of violence which bedizen our ubiquitous screens aren't victimless crimes - no matter how enthusiastically those who stage them, may consent. A few years ago Stephen Pinker published a book in which he set out to show that the venerable Dr Pangloss (a character in Voltaire's Candide) was in fact completely right - we are living in the best of possible worlds, while every day, and in every way, things can only get better.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a conference at Buenos Aires' Town Hall, March 23, 2016. WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been."

NEW YORK – Terrorists flying drones to spread highly radioactive material over a civilian area: That's part of the nightmare scenario President Barack Obama urged world leaders to consider as they debated better ways of controlling nuclear material. With the aid of apocalyptic fake newscasts, Obama told the group of 50 heads of state and foreign ministers in Washington Friday to imagine that a terrorist group had bought isotopes through brokers on the so-called dark Web. One shipment was picked up in transit by radiation monitors, but others were thought to be still on the move. The terrorists were believed to be planning to use a drone to distribute the material. Would authorities react in time?

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been." He added that over the last several years, the administration has worked to prevent civilian deaths.

WASHINGTON – The United States has conducted another drone strike in Somalia, targeting a senior al-Shabab leader thought to have been plotting attacks against Americans in Mogadishu, the Pentagon said Friday. The announcement came shortly before President Barack Obama offered detailed remarks about America's controversial drone program, saying some criticism of it had been "legitimate," and acknowledging there was "no doubt" the unmanned aircraft have killed innocent people in the past. Thursday's strike was conducted in cooperation with Somali officials and targeted Hassan Ali Dhoore, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said. The Pentagon said it was still assessing whether Dhoore had been killed. A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the strike targeted a vehicle Dhoore was riding in with two other al-Qaida-aligned al-Shabab members.