Scientists might soon take the most important portrait in the history of the universe: a picture of the centre of our galaxy. Observatories all around the world are being linked up and turned towards one specific part of the universe, getting an image of a black hole that is thought to be swirling there. That work has just begun and will run into next week, and might shed light on the darkest and most mysterious part of physics. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, has given a series of interviews in which he has criticised how the internet has developed, condemned how advertising has evolved and warned of the risks that global connectivity poses to users' privacy. In an interview with The Guardian, Sir Tim said that the Trump administration's decision to allow internet service providers to sign away their customers' privacy and sell users' browsing habits is "disgusting" and "appalling". The problem with the internet, he said, is that it can be "ridiculously revealing". "You have the right to go to a doctor in privacy where it's just between you and the doctor. And similarly, you have to be able to go to the web."

Amazon has agreed to refund $70 million worth of in-app purchases made by children without their parents' knowledge or authorisation. The company was taken to court by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) back in 2014 for failing to clearly inform parents that apps that are free to download from its app store can still allow in-app purchases. A US federal judge ruled in the FTC's favour, and Amazon appealed the decision last year. The firm was found to have failed to provide enough protective measures to prevent Amazon device users from unwittingly spending money. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Intel India announced the launch of its Artificial Intelligence Developer Program aimed at educating 15,000 individuals - scientists, developers, analysts and engineers - on AI technologies in a bid to boost the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the homeland. Aimed at promoting AI amongst Indian developers, Intel will organise 60 programs across the year, ranging from lectures, workshops, roadshows and roundtables. The initiative aims at imparting knowledge on the basics of adoption of AI via technical sessions. As India undergoes digital transformation, the intelligent analysis of the data collected will enable the government and the industry to make effective decisions offering increasing opportunities for using AI in the country. "To make this happen, Intel is collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Wipro, Julia Computing and Calligo Technologies, by enabling them with AI solutions based on Intel architecture," said Prakash Mallya, Managing Director, Intel South Asia.

A recent "fake news" scandal involving IT giant DeNA Co. shows how quickly bogus health information can make the rounds online. According to a 300-page report released last month by a third-party panel looking into the scandal, Welq -- one of the firm's 10 content curation sites and one that focused on health -- totally lacked the awareness that medical information should be handled carefully because inaccuracies can do serious harm to people's health. Instead, Welq worked hard to find an algorithm it could use to mass-produce articles that would dominate Google's search rankings. The site managers also naively believed that, in an era when the most rigorously researched and reported works of journalism struggle to sell, they could strike it rich as long as they kept readers attracted to the site, regardless of accuracy. As a result, some of the stories ended up looking like a bad joke, like the one that said ghosts might cause stiff shoulders.

AXA, the large global insurance company, has used machine learning in a POC to optimize pricing by predicting "large-loss" traffic accidents with 78% accuracy. The TensorFlow machine-learning framework has been open source since just 2015, but in that relatively short time, its ecosystem has exploded in size, with more than 8,000 open source projects using its libraries to date. This increasing interest is also reflected by its growing role in all kinds of image-processing applications (with examples including skin cancer detection, diagnosis of diabetic eye disease and even sorting cucumbers), as well as natural-language processing ones such as language translation. We're also starting to see TensorFlow used to improve predictive data analytics for mainstream business use cases, such as price optimization. For example, in this post, I'll describe why AXA, a large, global insurance company, built a POC using TensorFlow as a managed service on Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine for predicting "large-loss" car accidents involving its clients.

The $711m in value accounted for 44% of the global total, a quadruple increase on the previous year (10%). AI, IoT and analytics and big data propositions collectively accounted for 56% of the total number of deals – around 70% of total value last year. UK market doubles The value of insurtech investments in the UK more than doubled year on year to almost $19m, although the total number of deals remained flat. Accenture said that Brexit had not had a material impact on the investment climate in 2016. After the UK, Germany and France are the next largest markets in Europe.

As a tech writer, I sometimes feel about new technology the way I suspect military historians must feel about war: You just can't say you love every aspect of your subject. My default model for "tomorrow" is built on the bright and exciting images of yesterday's tomorrow, from "Star Trek" and Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Tom Swift. As naïve as it may sound, I inherited from the books, films and TV shows of my childhood a basically progressive view: Despite bumps and missteps occasionally setting us back along the way, technology ultimately would lead to a better future. And I believe it has. Despite the anxiety we seem to thrive on these days, this is a safer world than the one I was born into nearly 70 years ago.

A new report from the International Bar Association has outlined the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence (AI), which while bordering on scaremongering also makes some good points, writes Telecoms.com The report highlights there is likely to be a widening gap between the worlds' richest and poorest nations. Countries like China or Thailand have grown through the last few years partly due to the difference in labour costs. Primary (mining, for example) and secondary (manufacturing) industries have been moved offshore because of the cost benefit, though robotisation on a mass scale would make this transition redundant. The report highlights: "While one production working hour costs the German automotive industry more than €40, the use of a robot costs between €5 and €8 per hour. A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China is. A further aspect is that a robot cannot become ill, have children or go on strike and is not entitled to annual leave."

The World Economic Forum expects automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to result in the loss of at least 5 million jobs globally by 2020. Yes, machines are going to steal your jobs. It may sound like a scene from Terminator in which a robot may push you out of your office chair, but the reality is scarier and invisible to an extent. The major threat to your job is from machine learning. Machine Learning is the ability to process huge volumes of data and complete tasks in a more efficient way than a human being can. We're on the verge of a revolution in the modern workforce, and things are about to look very different.