In the new book The Tetris Effect, available September 6, veteran tech journalist Dan Ackerman presents the definitive telling of one of the most fascinating stories in videogame history: How the world's most popular, enduring, perfect videogame escaped the Iron Curtain. While many fierce rivals fought tooth and nail to secure the rights, it ended up as the killer app for Nintendo's Game Boy. In this exclusive excerpt, we learn how the game's creator, Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov, first conceived of the computer game that would change the world by playing with children's toys. Consumed by the idea of re-creating game experiences on his Electronica 60 and the other machines he worked on at the academy, Alexey found inspiration in the sprawling aisles of Children's World, the most famous toy store in Moscow. When he searched the store shelves, something familiar caught his eye.

Computer games are as good as drugs at helping children relax before operations, a study found. Boys and girls that played on an iPad ahead of surgery were just as calm as those given powerful sedatives. The find comes from a French study of 112 children aged four to ten who were having day surgery. Half were given a sedative ahead of the anaesthetic, to calm their nerves and to help the actual anaesthetic take better. These'pre-meds' are often given to young children but can also be used to help anxious adults relax.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. Pharmaceutical company Mylan is still in the news after hiking the price of life-saving EpiPens by more than 400%. But keep this in mind: Of roughly 250 million raised for and against 17 ballot measures coming before California voters in November, more than a quarter of that amount -- about 70 million -- has been contributed by deep-pocketed drug companies to defeat the Drug Price Relief Act, which would limit drug prices charged to state healthcare programs. Spending on the measure could set a state record over coming weeks. No buzz kill: New federal rules for small commercial drones go into effect Monday.

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had found the perfect father for their baby. Seven years after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a narcissistic personality disorder and a criminal history. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation. The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donor's name, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple.

A new technique using artificial intelligence to read satellite images could aid efforts to eradicate global poverty by indicating where help is needed most, a team of U.S. researchers say. The method would assist governments and charities trying to fight poverty but lacking precise and reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, the researchers based at Stanford University in California said. Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than 1.25 a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals adopted by United Nations member states last year. A team of computer scientists and satellite experts created a self-updating world map to locate poverty, said Marshall Burke, assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Earth System Science. It uses a computer algorithm that recognizes signs of poverty through a process called machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, he said.

By 2034/35, almost 20% of Australians (6.2 million) are projected to be aged 65 or over. One sector already feeling the impact of the ageing population is construction. In Queensland, the number of construction workers aged 55 and over increased from 8% of full-time workers in 1992 to 14.2% in 2014. An ageing workforce is likely to increase the need for less physically demanding jobs or maybe technology might address this issue. Task automation and the industry's innovation culture are two of the greatest areas of uncertainty for the construction industry.

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Artificial intelligence has held great promise for decades now. Since the 1950s, experts have been predicting that the day when computers would think like humans was just around the corner. By the 1970s, as one system after another failed the Turing Test, artificial intelligence research fell out of favor -- the hype largely deflated by the influential book "Perceptrons," by Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky. Recently, however, a series of advances in computing and so-called machine learning has triggered renewed interest in the potential of artificial intelligence. And while computers might not (yet) be self-aware or able to think like human beings, they becoming very good at learning how to diagnose diseases, find and defend against malware -- and beat humans at games of chess and Go.

China's biggest search engine, Baidu, announced it will use Intel's Xeon Phi processor when the processor's release plan was disclosed on August 17 at Intel's annual developer forum in San Francisco. "When it comes to AI (artificial intelligence), Intel's Xeon Phi is a great fit," said Jing Wang, a senior vice president of Baidu, who joined Diane Bryant, executive vice president in charge of Intel's data center group, at the forum. Intel said Xeon Phi will help accelerate deep learning, a computerized technique increasingly used for tasks such as interpreting speech, identifying objects in photos and piloting autonomous vehicles. Baidu, having researched the application of artificial intelligence for years, is considering using the new chip to support its voice recognition system, called Deep Speech. Deep Speech is based on the collection of 7,000 hours of voice clips created by 9,600 people.

A company founded in 1984 to produce high-end audio systems is now on the vanguard of the self-driving vehicle frontier with key financial backing from Ford and Baidu, China's largest search engine provider. Velodyne, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company, just received 150 million from Ford and Baidu to continue development and production of Lidar, or the 3D light-powered radar that helps self-driving cars see where they are going. With a presence on three continents, Velodyne is now regularly mentioned in research reports that cite leading companies in the niche field of lidar. Lidar emits short pulses of laser light so that software in the self-driving vehicle can create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of what's around it. In addition to cars, the systems also have growing potential for agricultural equipment, mining vehicles and military vehicles.