Apple used its strongest Attenborough voice to poke a little fun at its 2018 WWDC attendees on Monday. The keynote's opening video called back to last year's mega-hit BBC documentary series Planet Earth II and provides the viewing public, for perhaps the first time, a look into the migratory and social habits of the elusive Developer tritorapsis. Nature is a cruel and unforgiving mistress, to be sure, but not nearly as cruel as Apple's PR department is in this promotional video. According to Apple, D. tritorapsis is a unique species of the Developer genus. They're found on every continent worldwide, save for Antarctica, and exhibit a wide range of morphologies specifically adapted to their local programming environments.

The Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Authority (HKCAA) suggests that UAV users may need to register their drones with authorities, undertake training, pass tests and meet certain insurance requirements. As per the new rules, drone weighing over 9 ounces would need to be registered and the operators need to undertake short web-based training. But before making any changes, Hong Kong needs to go through a three month period of public consultation. The proposal will also include making certain parts of the island into no-fly zones. Still, there are number of countries that require proper registration and a license to fly.

There are three big questions about artificial intelligence and its impact on society: What can it do? And how fast will it spread? Experts are working to definitively answer each of those questions, but there is no doubt that AI will be transformative. McKinsey estimates that up to one third of the American workforce will have to switch to new occupations by 2030. Those figures are unsettling, but AI does not come without a plethora of positives.

The space race was in full swing. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus). And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. Then on April 2, 1968 (May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released--and I was keen to see it. So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I'd ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). I'd been dropped off for a matinee, and was pretty much the only person in the theater. And to this day, I remember sitting in a plush seat and eagerly waiting for the curtain to go up, and the movie to begin. It started with an impressive extraterrestrial sunrise. But then what was going on? Those were landscapes, and animals. I was confused, and frankly a little bored. But just when I was getting concerned, there was a bone thrown in the air that morphed into a spacecraft, and pretty soon there was a rousing waltz--and a big space station turning majestically on the screen. The next two hours had a big effect on me. It wasn't really the spacecraft (I'd seen plenty of them in books by then, and in fact made many of my own concept designs). But what was new and exciting for me in the movie was the whole atmosphere of a world full of technology--and the notion of what might be possible there, with all those bright screens doing things, and, yes, computers driving it all. It would be another year before I saw my first actual computer in real life. But those two hours in 1968 watching 2001 defined an image of what the computational future could be like, that I carried around for years. I think it was during the intermission to the movie that some seller of refreshments--perhaps charmed by a solitary kid so earnestly pondering the movie--gave me a "cinema program" about the movie. Half a century later I still have that program, complete with a food stain, and faded writing from my 8-year-old self, recording (with some misspelling) where and when I saw the movie. A lot has happened in the past 50 years, particularly in technology, and it's an interesting experience for me to watch 2001 again--and compare what it predicted with what's actually happened. Of course, some of what's actually been built over the past 50 years has been done by people like me, who were influenced in larger or smaller ways by 2001. When Wolfram Alpha was launched in 2009--showing some distinctly HAL-like characteristics--we paid a little homage to 2001 in our failure message (needless to say, one piece of notable feedback we got at the beginning was someone asking: "How did you know my name was Dave?!"). One very obvious prediction of 2001 that hasn't panned out, at least yet, is routine, luxurious space travel. But like many other things in the movie, it doesn't feel like what was predicted was off track; it's just that--50 years later--we still haven't got there yet. Well, they have lots of flat-screen displays, just like real computers today.

Accurate demand forecasts can help on-line retail organizations better plan their supply-chain processes. The challenge, however, is the large number of associative factors that result in large, non-stationary shifts in demand, which traditional time series and regression approaches fail to model. In this paper, we propose a Neural Network architecture called AR-MDN, that simultaneously models associative factors, time-series trends and the variance in the demand. We first identify several causal features and use a combination of feature embeddings, MLP and LSTM to represent them. We then model the output density as a learned mixture of Gaussian distributions. The AR-MDN can be trained end-to-end without the need for additional supervision. We experiment on a dataset of an year's worth of data over tens-of-thousands of products from Flipkart. The proposed architecture yields a significant improvement in forecasting accuracy when compared with existing alternatives.

A thriving super colony of some 1.5 million Adelie penguins has been discovered on the remote Danger Islands in the east Antarctic, surprised scientists announced. Just 100 miles (160 kilometres) away in the west Antarctic, the same species is in decline due to sea ice melt blamed on global warming, they said. The first complete census revealed that the Danger Islands host more than 750,000 breeding pairs of Adelie penguins, more than the rest of the Antarctic Peninsula region combined, the team reported. It included the third and fourth-largest Adelie penguin colonies in the world. A thriving super colony of some 1.5 million Adelie penguins has been discovered on the remote Danger Islands in the east Antarctic, surprised scientists announced.

On a dark computer monitor, a million light dots appear as a solid sheet, each dot representing a light particle. With a slow turn of the hand, the sheet approaches the black hole. As it passes, the gravitational monster swallows any light particles in its direct path, creating a circular cutout in the sheet of particles. The rest of the particles are on track to move past the black hole, or so it seems. But they don't get very far: Instead of continuing along their straight lines of travel, their paths bend inward and they loop around the black hole and converge in one point, forming a sphere of photons around it.

NASA's sun-observing spacecraft has captured colorful images of the moment the earth blocked its view of the sun. In a short animation posted on Tuesday, the Solar Dynamics Observatory's (SDO) view of a purple-colored sun is interrupted as Earth completely covers its surface. The sun isn't actually purple, but it looks that color because the images were taken in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light. This kind of ultraviolet light is a type that's usually invisible to the human eye, so NASA noted that it's been colorized in purple. Stunning footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures when the earth completely covers its view of the sun.

The Agung volcano erupts, spewing magma and ash thousands of feet into the air on the island of Bali in Indonesia in November 2017.Josh Edelson/ZUMA This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A trope of sci-fi movies these days, from Snowpiercer to Geostorm, is that our failure to tackle climate change will eventually force us to deploy an arsenal of unproven technologies to save the planet. Think sun-deflecting space mirrors or chemically altered clouds. And because these are sci-fi movies, it's assumed that these grand experiments in geoengineering will go horribly wrong. The fiction, new evidence suggests, may be much closer to reality than we thought.

Astronauts are spending a month in isolation on a simulated'red planet' in the desolate Dhofar desert in Oman to help prepare humanity for a future mission to Mars. Using a drone, robotic rovers and an inflatable greenhouse, the astronauts will carry out 19 experiments on this baron area, picked for its resemblance to Mars. Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse and few animals or plants survive its temperatures that can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius. On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base is a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters. More than 200 scientists from 25 nations have chosen it as their location to field-test technology for a manned mission to the red planet which Nasa hopes to achieve by the 2030s.