A team of scientists have developed a model that can predict the likelihood of bat species carrying Ebola and other filoviruses using a machine learning algorithm. Filoviruses are a group of long filament shaped viruses that encode their genome on a single-stranded RNA. Ebola is the most well-known example; other filoviruses include Marburg disease. Both are lethal viruses that are spread by coming into contact with bodily fluids from an infected person. The last Ebola outbreak happened in 2014 and resulted in 11,310 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation.

In a moment of fright, it's often said that you'll'jump right out of your skin' – but for one ancient insect, that's just what happened. Researchers have discovered a 50-million-year-old deposit of Baltic amber containing the exoskeleton of an ancient insect, which appears to have rapidly shed its skin in order to escape the flowing sap. The specimen also contains the first mushroom ever found in Baltic amber, along with the hair of a mammal thought to have bitten it from the base of a tree. Researchers have discovered a 50-million-year-old deposit of Baltic amber containing the exoskeleton of an ancient insect, which appears to have rapidly shed its skin in order to escape the flowing sap. Amber has been used in jewellery for thousands of years.

At Algorithmia, we believe in democratizing access to state-of-the-art algorithmic intelligence. That's why we're introducing a solution for hosting and distributing trained deep learning models on Algorithmia using GPUs in the cloud. Today, researchers and developers can train their neural nets locally, and deploy them to Algorithmia's scalable, cloud infrastructure, where they become smart API endpoints for other developers to use. We're excited to announce initial native support for the Caffe, Theano, and TensorFlow frameworks, and have added 16 open source deep learning models that run as microservices to start. Support for Torch and MxNet are coming soon.

Illustration credit: Anirban BoraBetween the Terminator movies, Ava from'Ex Machina', Google's AlphaGo beating the world's best human Go players, machines mimicking Rembrandt's style to paint portraits, debates about morality and privacy, and Stephen Hawking's warnings about the consequences of intelligent machines manned by idiot humans; it's no wonder that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made people a little uncomfortable. In the marketing world, it's caused the customary outbreak of confusion. Thus resulting in a series of obtuse declarations like "AI will change everything. EVERYTHING!" that are typical of the industry. Any time anything new threatens to upset business as usual, comrades in the marketing and advertising industry especially lunge headlong into an existential crisis. For instance, "Will AI make the creative kind obsolete?"

This week on the premiere of Mr. Robot, the hacktivist collective fsociety made good on its threat to bring down the evil E Corp. With a few strokes of the keyboard, a USB stick and a little social engineering, the anarchists infected the corporate giant's banking division with ransomware, locking up thousands of files and closing it for business. As the character Darlene prepared her malicious code, real hackers watching no doubt chuckled at the familiar words on her screen: "Hack the Gibson…and remember…hugs are worth more than handshakes." Like so much about the hacking on Mr. Robot, that detail was for them. When these episodes air, I don't watch the episodes, I keep my eye on Reddit and Twitter and see what people are saying about it.

Factory robots are not generally considered to be the most exciting bits of technology. But car company Ford is trying to change this by introducing a new robot to one of its European production lines. It can make coffee, give workers fist bumps and even administer a creepy robotic head massage. Factory robots are not generally considered the most exciting bits of technology. But car company Ford is trying to change this by introducing a new robot to one of its European production lines.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Google's self-driving car right now is that you can't pull up Google Maps, pick a destination and tell the car to go there. That's because to learn new routes, the car has to be "trained" by a human driver at least once or twice first. But now a number of organizations, including Ford Motor Company, Stanford University and an investment firm run by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, have invested 6.6 million into a company that promises to leapfrog that navigation issue by creating cheap, detailed maps that driverless cars will be able to read on the fly. And these maps will be created by regular drivers such as yourself, according to Civil Maps, the company behind the idea. In that respect, the concept is a bit like another Google-owned product, Waze.

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, might only be years away. And a new report from the UN warns of the dangers if terrorists got their hands on these kind of'killer robots'. The report, which was a result of a week-long meeting on such weapons, held in Geneva earlier this year, said swarms of autonomous weapons would be capable of carrying out attacks. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction (like the plot of Terminator, pictured) toward reality Experts from dozens of countries gathered in Geneva earlier this year to consider the implications of'Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems' (LAWS).

Images have emerged of a strange drone shaped like a real bird that was found crashed in Somalia, leading to claims it was being used to spy on targets. The metal bird, which is shaped to mimic a large bird of prey with'feathered' wings, is reported to have been recovered in an area of the capital, Mogadishu. According to local reports, the unmanned vehicle, which has two propellers attached to its wings, may be a surveillance craft used by the Somali intelligence agency, NISA. The drone is reported to have crashed in Mogadishu, Somalia earlier this week. Low quality images show it to resemble a large bird of prey.

SEOUL--Samsung Electronics Co. said it will acquire a stake in BYD Co. via the Chinese electric vehicle and battery maker's 2.3 billion share sale, as the South Korean technology giant bets on the automotive market to drive growth. Samsung's latest move comes as more technology companies tap into the automotive industry as it undergoes a shift toward next-generation vehicles such as electric and self-driving cars.