For many people in Zambia with health queries, sending a text message is the best way to get it answered. U-report, a free SMS-based service set up by UNICEF and run by volunteers, receives many thousands of questions a month, many specifically about HIV and AIDS. Also popular in Uganda, U-report has seen usage triple in the last three years, and about a thousand new users register every day. The volume of messages is growing so fast that the volunteers can't keep up, so UNICEF is testing software that reads and responds to many of the messages automatically. In Zambia, there are roughly 27,000 new HIV infections a year, according to UNICEF, and 40 per cent of these are in those aged 15 to 24.

Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate. As it dipped low before the drop-off area, the bottom popped open, and a cardboard box with a parachute made of butcher paper and biodegradable tape burst out, plopping to the ground a few steps away from CEO Keller Rinaudo, who walked over to retrieve it.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has reshaped the company since taking over two years ago. Windows is still important, but it's no longer the only platform that matters: Microsoft is releasing software and supporting app development for Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and even its old enemy Linux. The infighting and aggressive dismissal of competitors is mostly gone. And Nadella has embraced cloud computing -- the idea that some customers don't want to run their own technology but would prefer to outsource it -- turning Microsoft into the clear No. 2 in the category after Amazon. We caught up with Nadella fresh off the company's Build conference for developers last week in San Francisco and ahead of the new Envision conference for business leaders, which kicks off Monday in New Orleans. Matt Rosoff: There was a lot of talk last week at Build about chatbots and artificial agents and "conversation as a platform." That idea is not new, right? I think I heard Bill Gates talking about it 15 years ago.

For his last hurrah, Nathan Drake is getting some help from an unlikely ally. The jovial treasure hunter has been the star of the Uncharted series since the first entry debuted in 2007 for PlayStation 3. Nearly 10 years and 21 million copies sold later, developer Naughty Dog is ready to say goodbye to the action-adventure franchise with Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (out May 10 exclusively for PlayStation 4). During a recent presentation for the press in Los Angeles, creative director Neil Druckmann said "compromising was never an option" for Nate's swan song, hence the numerous delays the game went through before the studio firmly settled on a date. Naughty Dog wasn't satisfied with just making a larger, prettier sequel. A lot of the innovations in Uncharted 4 actually occur in between the action-packed set pieces and impressively detailed cutscenes.

Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate.

The vultures of Britain's International Centre for Birds of Prey don't know it, but they're dupes. Every day, the giant birds carefully tend to their eggs, rotating them periodically so they incubate just right. But…take a closer look at that nest. Not every egg in there is made of calcium carbonate, and they don't always contain baby birds. No, at this conservation center, some of those eggs are actually 3-D printed.

Drones first glided into the public imagination in the early 2000s when the US Air Force and the CIA started using school bus-sized Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and airstrikes in the Middle East. These days, the US Army wants something a bit smaller: Pocket-sized drones that soldiers can use in battle zones to see around corners, over hills, or behind trees to aoid ambushes and other surprises. Ideally, soldiers will be able to launch such a nano-drone quickly, the Army says. "It will send real-time video back to the operator to give them real-time situational awareness of what's in the immediate vicinity," says says Phil Cheatham, the deputy branch chief for electronics at the Army's Maneuvers Center for Excellence (MCOE). The Army wants something affordable that can be ordered in bulk to provide a drone to each squad. The Army already uses satellite imagery and larger drones to provide broader battlefield intelligence, Cheatham says.

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.