China is just days away from kicking off a historic mission to explore the dark side of the moon. The Chang'e-4, which launches on December 8th, will be the first ever rover to land on the far side of the lunar surface. The spacecraft is slated to leave from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province, before entering the moon's orbit and hopefully touching down in the massive, 186-kilometer-wide Von Karman crater on the moon's south pole. The Chang'e-4, which launches on December 8th, will be the first ever rover land on the far side of the lunar surface. It will visit an unexplored region of the lunar surfacecalled the South Pole-Aitken Basin, located in the southern hemisphere of the dark side of the moon, which includes the Von Karman crater, among many others.

Speaking at the 13th edition of CII Agro Tech India-2018 in Chandigarh, President Kovind said, "Reinforcing what the Narendra Modi-led government has been propagating in their tenure, a "strong bond" was crucial between agriculture and technology." In previous decades, manufacturing and mechanization have been of appreciable utility to agriculture. Today a strong relationship is emerging between agriculture and the services sector." BIOTECHNOLOGY, NANOTECHNOLOGY, DATA SCIENCE, REMOTE-SENSING IMAGING, AUTONOMOUS AERIAL AND GROUND VEHICLES, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HOLD THE KEY TO GENERATING MORE VALUE FOR AGRICULTURE. The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) had unveiled a discussion paper earlier this year which addressed the national strategy on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies in India.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Lawyers representing South Korean plaintiffs in a World War Two forced labor court case against Japan's Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. have set a Dec. 24 deadline for the firm to show willingness to discuss a court verdict on compensation.

The Singapore Fintech Festival was probably the biggest one here yet, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has made some definitive pushes into big data, artificial intelligence, and the launch of an ASEAN-wide API to answer the global demand for open banking principles. More recently though, MAS has given an idea of their plans for the future, with a US$5 billion (SG$6.91 billion) worth private market programme allocated as its investment portfolio into the private markets asset class--a move by MAS to anchor global asset managers into Singapore and catalyse more growth in that sector of Singapore. MAS has also announced a "Sandbox Express" to complement its existing sandbox, which are pre-defined sandboxes so that fintechs can conduct their experiments more quickly than the existing measures. And all of this does not yet venture into the often volatile, but always interesting startup sector. Fintechnews has identified 13 promising Singapore based Fintech companies which will shake 2019's direction and purpose, one way or another.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to progress and will eventually impact all industries," Alexandro Pando, the CEO of digital disruptive firm Xyrupt Technologies recently told Forbes. AI, which refers to the use of computer algorithms to replace the human ability to learn and make predictions, is booming. According to a new KPMG report, $12.4 billion has been invested in AI to date, with the figure expected to skyrocket to an incredible $232 billion by 2025. The study also found that 40% of industry leaders said they would be increasing investment in the technology by 20% or more over the next few years. The potential benefits of AI are varied and can positively impact a host of divergent sectors. In retail, for example, Japan's SoftBank telecom operations partnered with French firm Aldebaran to develop "Pepper" – a humanoid robot.

Debbie Vitany is fighting a losing battle against Fortnite. Her 17-year-old son, Carson, has been logging 12 hours a day on the video game, searching for weapons and resources in a post-apocalyptic world where the goal is being the last person standing. Teachers complain he falls asleep in class and his grades have plummeted. "We'd made some progress in getting him to cut down his Fortnite hours and get better sleep, but he's slipped back into his old habits," Ms Vitany, who lives near Saginaw, Michigan, said in an interview. "I've never seen a game that has such control over kids' minds."

Tumblr will ban all adult content, it has said. The decision is a major reversal for a company that partly made its name for the relative availability of explicit content on its site. The ban will cover just about anything that could be known as explicit, it said. "Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content--including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations--that depicts sex acts," it wrote in its announcement. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona.

The dawn of 8K resolution television has arrived as a Japanese television network broadcasts the first programmes in the format. Japan's national public broadcasting organisation, NHK, is now sending both 4K and 8K channels via satellite to viewers. The first film shown in 8K will be '2001: A Space Odyssey' and Stanley Kubrick's classic film was scanned by Warned Bros on 70mm film negatives to produce the high-resolution masterpiece. This newest resolution has four times as many pixels vertically and horizontally as current top-end 4K Ultra HD screens, and 16 times more than standard 1080p HD. NHK is currently the only channel pushing for the 8K medium as specialist equipment and huge price-tags puts off consumers and companies alike.

Blockchain may have been the obvious choice when one considers the subcategory of fintech that might gain traction this year, but we should have expected that the rise of a more reliable ledger system would pave the way to the rise of companies that would be able to utilise information gleaned from said ledger. Either through newly collected information or utilising data banks that have been sitting idly in data caches of various big corporations, artificial intelligence (AI) has risen and may pave the way for the future of fintech. McKinsey estimates that AI could potentially create between US$3.5 trillion and US$5.8 trillion in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries. In Asia, Hong Kong's AI sector is getting a slice of a HK$50 billion of budget 2019, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore has a standing US$27 million AI grant named AIDA furthering the island nation's drive into artificial intelligence. With the world waking up to the scene, we have compiled a list of AI companies to watch that have a stake in fintech.

Artificial Intelligence – specifically machine learning and deep learning – was everywhere in 2018 and don't expect the hype to die down over the next 12 months. The hype will die eventually of course, and AI will become another consistent thread in the tapestry of our lives, just like the internet, electricity, and combustion did in days of yore. But for at least the next year, and probably longer, expect astonishing breakthroughs as well as continued excitement and hyperbole from commentators. This is because expectations of the changes to business and society which AI promises (or in some cases threatens) to bring about go beyond anything dreamed up during previous technological revolutions. AI points towards a future where machines not only do all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution but also the "thinking" work – planning, strategizing and making decisions.