On Sunday, the Japanese prime minister turned up at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games dressed up as Mario, the eponymous hero of the popular video game series created in 1985. Who is Mario and how did he come by his global appeal? Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared as the Nintendo game character Super Mario at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games. Mario Brothers is the best-selling video franchise of all time, with more than 490 million units sold since 1995, according to research firm NPD. There are more than 100 games, for various gaming systems, ranging from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Kart, in which Mario is the primary character, and many more in which he makes appearances.

The winners of the Hugo Awards were announced at a gala ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, marking a good night for women and authors of color, and a very bad one for the "Puppies." Writers N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, both of whom are African American women, won the novel and novella awards, respectively. It was a defeat for the groups the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, who for two years have semi-successfully gamed the nominations for the Hugos -- which along with the Nebula Awards are generally considered the preeminent awards in science fiction and fantasy -- in an attempt to advance their anti-diversity agendas. Jemisin, who won for her novel "The Fifth Season," referenced the Puppies in her acceptance speech, io9 reports. "Only a small number of ideologues have attempted to game the Hugo Awards," Jemisin said.

Cancer, the single most feared diagnosis imaginable, is being tackled by some of the biggest companies in the world using the most formidable weapon: à la artificial intelligence. In fact, the milestones we have hit in past two years in diagnosing rare forms of cancer using clinical data, has stumped the scientific community. At the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science, IBM's Watson matched a patients' symptoms against 20 million clinical oncology studied. In the western world, Google and Amazon are helping scientists analyze genetic data. Both, Google Genomics and Amazon Web Services, are offering analytical functions of the cloud to help scientists make sense of genomics data.

By John Markoff SUNNYVALE: For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence (AI)and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.

The ancient Chinese game of Go has simple rules, yet is extremely sophisticated. With a large board and few restrictions, the game is said to be a googol (10 to the hundredth power) times more complex than chess. There are more possible positions in Go than there are atoms in the universe. The game, in which opponents take turns placing black or white stones on a board, is played largely through intuition. Players understand that moves made early in the game can shape the match dozens of plays later. Go's subtleties, patterns, and elegance have captivated players, scholars, and mathematicians for millennia.

BT and Ticketmaster are more than just global leaders in their industries – they are example enterprise organisations already implementing artificial intelligence technology like Natural Language Process, Digital Assistants and Text Analytics into their strategies to improve customer support, experience and business growth. With the news of Google's DeepMind machine learning system and IBM's breakthrough artificial (AI) imitation of brain neurons, it's easy to assume that AI is still designated to hi-tech facilities with scientists in white lab coats and robots rolling past – and business leaders are not exempt from this belief. Although common rebuffs about artificial intelligence claim'there aren't many use cases in the space', AI within enterprise businesses is already available and being implemented – perhaps just not on the same scale or format of what we see in media today (ie the all-robot staff at the Henn-na Hotel in Japan). "We've identified 191 discrete use cases where artificial intelligence is being used today, or will be used in the near future," notes Clint Wheelock, CEO, managing director of Tractica, a market intelligence firm focused on human interaction with technology. "These use cases span 27 different industries and range from well-known applications like algorithmic trading or static image recognition to more specialized emerging areas such as emotion recognition or processing of healthcare patient data."

Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe. As much as that data has the potential to provide invaluable information to humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and policymakers, there is too much of it to sift through in order to draw insights that could influence important decisions. A team of researchers from Stanford University, however, says it has developed an efficient way. By creating a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize signs of poverty in satellite images – such as condition of roads – the team sorted through a million images to accurately identify economic conditions in five African countries, reported the scientists in the journal Science on Thursday.

A global hub of the machinery industry, Taiwan is stepping up efforts to develop innovative smart manufacturing technologies. From May 20-24 this year, about 30,000 visitors, including buyers from Asia, Europe and the U.S., flocked to the Commercial Exhibition Center in Taichung City, central Taiwan for the Automatic Machinery and Intelligent Manufacturing Exhibition. The trade show has been staged annually in Taichung for more than three decades, though this marked the first time that intelligent manufacturing was used in the title of the event. Organizer Commercial Times, one of the country's two major financial newspapers, opted to alter the name of the show to highlight the growing focus on this field in the nation's globally competitive machinery sector. "This is the 32nd edition of our machinery show in Taichung. But unlike previous events, this year's exhibition features intelligent machines to reflect the current trend in manufacturing systems development," Chen Kuo-wei (???), president of Commercial Times, said at the opening ceremony of the five-day event, which generated business deals totaling about NT 300 million (US 9.2 million).