More investors are setting their sights on the financial technology (Fintech) arena. According to consulting firm Accenture, investment in Fintech firms rose by 10 percent worldwide to the tune of $23.2 billion in 2016. China is leading the charge after securing $10 billion in investments in 55 deals which account for 90 percent of investments in Asia-Pacific. The US came second taking in $6.2 billion in funding. Europe, also saw an 11 percent increase in deals despite Britain seeing a decrease in funding due to the uncertainty from the Brexit vote.

Has a digital coup begun? Is big data being used, in the US and the UK, to create personalised political advertising, to bypass our rational minds and alter the way we vote? The short answer is probably not. A series of terrifying articles suggests that a company called Cambridge Analytica helped to swing both the US election and the EU referendum by mining data from Facebook and using it to predict people's personalities, then tailoring advertising to their psychological profiles. These reports, originating with the Swiss publication Das Magazin (published in translation by Vice), were clearly written in good faith, but apparently with insufficient diligence.

Bengaluru-based Microsoft Accelerator has selected 14 startups for its startup accelerator programme. It is the tenth batch for Microsoft's Accelerator Programme. Selected startups belong to the realm of AI and machine learning and will undergo an intensive programme to increase their'enterprise readiness quotient.' The cohort has been selected from VC portfolios – including Inventus Capital Partners, Ideaspring Capital, Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and Pi Ventures, based on their nominations. They were selected based upon founder experience and industry expertise, products, and traction, as per an official statement.

Why doesn't the United States have high-speed bullet trains like Europe and Asia? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. First, let me state that I am a huge fan of high-speed rail. My first experience with high-speed rail was on Taiwan's high-speed rail line in 2008 which shortened the time it took to traverse the island from five hours to two. My second was on my honeymoon when my wife and I traversed continental Europe on its clean and efficient high-speed rail network. It kills me to think that for the amount of money and resources we have spent on the second Iraq war, we could have built the backbone of a nationwide high-speed rail network and subsidized its use for a number of years while it ramped up to optimal capacity.

Some of the world's biggest leaders in science and technology including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates, have expressed their concerns about the rapid progression and evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk in a CNBC interview stated, "I think that the biggest risk is not that the AI will develop a will of its own… but rather that it will follow the will of people that establish its utility function." Movies like The Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey amongst others, all point to the notion that artificial intelligence will evolve past human intelligence to the point that we will no longer be able to control our own creations. There is an ingrained narrative that AI will somehow reach a level of self-awareness and inevitably then attempt to destroy or replace the human race. And while some of these ideas may seem excessive, or merely the product of media and film exaggeration of AI leading to Terminator-like robots hunting humans like deer, there is enough concern amongst thought leaders such as those mentioned above, to make these concerns highly credible even if there is no certainty about them ever playing out.

March 11, 2017 --Dominating the night sky, Earth's natural satellite is often the first target to catch the eye of budding astronomers, and now the moon's siren call is pulling the world's leading space powers too. The five space agencies responsible for building the International Space Station (ISS) met last month in Tsukuba, home to the Japanese space agency JAXA, to decide what comes after the aging ISS. Discussions advanced an evolving plan to build a lunar space station, settling on a tentative orbit and paving the way for finalized plans that may come in late 2017 or early 2018. But friction remains around the ultimate goal of the station: Will the ISS successor be a truly lunar space station or a spaceport on the way to Mars? With the ISS's decommissioning tentatively scheduled for 2024, the International Spacecraft Working Group (ISWG), composed of the American, Russian, Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies, is looking ahead to the next phase of human space exploration.

On this day in 1818, the novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", by 21-year-old author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was published. Frankenstein is often considered the world's first science fiction novel, as it mixes elements of Victorian ghost stories with elements of modern technology, chemistry and biology. She describes the weather at the time as a "wet, unpleasant summer, continuous rainfall kept us inside the house." Bored, the friends worked on creepy stories, reflecting the gloomy atmosphere surrounding them, but only Shelley completed hers. The year 1816 is today famous as the year without a summer.

All existing computers, from the building-sized Sunway Taihulight supercomputer in China to the device you are using to read this article, are based on the principles of a Turing machine. Named for Manchester's own Dr. Alan Turing, Turing machines are theoretical devices that run on a set of strict instructions. A typical deterministic Turing machine (DTM) might have a direction: "If my state is A, then perform task 1." The DNA computer would however be a non-deterministic universal Turing Machine (NUTM). An NUTM is a Turing machine that can solve multiple tasks at once that a DTM can only solve one at a time.

As Carrington Institute's most promising new Agent, Joanna Dark must uncover the truth behind the dataDyne Corporation's recent technological breakthroughs - breakthroughs which could have serious consequences for mankind."

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.