The idea of bringing people back from the dead by transplanting their brains into donor bodies may sound like science fiction. But the bizarre vision could be a reality within three years, according to a controversial Italian surgeon. Professor Sergio Canavero is famed for his plans to carry out the first human head transplant next year, and says that he will then focus on brain transplants. Critics say Professor Canavero's plans are'pure fantasy'. The Italian has been compared to the fictional gothic-horror character Dr Frankenstein and Arthur Caplan, the director of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Centre, has described Dr Canavero as'nuts'.

Nvidia is on a quest to find the best "social impact" artificial intelligence startups as part of a program called Nvidia Inception, which is screening more than 600 entrants to cull the best AI startups in three big categories. We wrote about the first four candidates for the hottest emerging startup on Friday and the five most-disruptive startups on Sunday morning. And now we're focusing on the next five candidates in a category dubbed the "potential for social impact" startups. They all happen to be in the medical space. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, hosted a Shark Tank-style event last week to narrow down the competition. Huang and a panel of judges listened to pitches from 14 AI startups across three categories.

Mo Gawdat is the chief business officer at Google X – the "moonshot factory" responsible for some of the company's more audacious projects, such as self-driving cars and a balloon-powered global internet. Before he joined Google, while working as stock trader and tech executive in Dubai and in response to a period of depression, he used his engineer's mindset to create an "equation for happiness". The equation says that happiness is greater than, or equal to, your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be. When his 21-year-old son Ali died during a routine operation, Gawdat turned to the equation, which they had worked on together, in an attempt to come to terms with his tragic loss. Gawdat's book, Solve for Happy, explains the theories underpinning the equation and how it helped him sustain his life after Ali's death.

A US drone strike has killed five suspected members of al-Qaeda in central Yemen, according to local news media and a government security official. Yemen Ajel, a local news website, reported that the drone fired three consecutive missiles at 12:30am local time on Sunday, or 22:30 GMT on Saturday, at a car reportedly transporting weapons to Marib province. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a military official told AFP news agency that the car belonged to a local leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The strike comes 24 hours after a similar raid killed three suspected AQAP operatives in the southern Shabwa province, which has been a central target of the US military. The US has stepped up its use of drone strikes under President Donald Trump, with the Pentagon confirming more than 70 strikes since February 28.

Nvidia is on a quest to find the most disruptive artificial intelligence startups. This quest is part of a larger contest, dubbed Nvidia Inception, which is screening more than 600 entrants to cull the best AI startups in three big categories. We wrote about the first four candidates for the hottest emerging startup on Friday. And now we're focusing on the next five candidates in the category dubbed the "most disruptive" startups. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, hosted a Shark Tank-style event this week as part of the search to find the best AI startups. Huang and a panel of judges listened to pitches from 14 AI startups across three categories.

Chris Skinner is surprised when he hears that he's popular among bankers. Surprised because the messages he delivers are often uncomfortable. Skinner intends to push bankers out of their comfort zone. While never a banker himself, Skinner has worked on banking projects for several technology companies before establishing his niche as a fintech blogger (TheFinanser.com) His specialty is discerning relevant chords amid all the noise regarding technology and its impact on financial services.

Baidu, a technology-based media company, is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Parent company Baidu, Inc. today announced that its international mobile ad network, DU Ad Platform, has successfully bolstered their offerings for developers and advertisers across the globe. Adding to its existing features, the DU Ad Platform now supports both video ads and trigger ads on Android, as well as native ads on iOS. The announcement was made at Baidu's 2017 "AI-Enabled Ad Platform" conference in Beijing. Johnson Hu, GM of Baidu's Global Business Unit said, "We're thrilled to help advertisers reach their audience even more accurately, and enable developers to effortlessly maximize their revenues." The DU Ad Platform uses an AI-enhanced technology called the "Peak Selection Algorithm", which automatically maximizes revenues from ad campaigns, and its inventory covers more than 2 billion users across 200 countries and regions.

A helicopter pelts Guam's trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the U.S. Midwest. In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins. "Critters are smart -- they survive," said biologist Rob "Goose" Gosnell, head of U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. "Trying to outsmart them is hard to do." Invasive species are plants and animals that thrive in areas where they don't naturally live, usually brought there by humans, either accidentally or intentionally.

The smokestack of a refinery stands next to the Mantaro River in La Oroya, Peru. One of the things that has intrigued me the most about deep learning image cataloging algorithms is their ability to watch the world go by at scale each day through the incredible volume of news and social media images that are generated from every corner of the world and essentially generate a live ground truthed catalog of what's happening moment by moment. Of particular interest for disaster response and environmental monitoring is the ability of such algorithms to recognize imagery of flooding, drought, smog, litter, destruction, violence and other indicators of ongoing ground and air pollution and sudden natural disasters. What might a system look like? Two years ago I met Kadi Kenk, Head of Partnerships for "Let's do it" which is a social good organization founded in Estonia in 2008 that bills itself as a "social movement against trash."

The writer is the editor and translator of Why I write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto, published by Westland in 2014. He is executive director of Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own. In the United States, there has been a strange issue that is being discussed. It is being written about in books, and there are talks on it (which one can access on YouTube), but there is yet no action on it, though this is expected soon. The issue is that of artificial intelligence becoming smarter than man.