Let's suppose you've agreed to a rather odd travel program, where you're going to be suddenly transported to a randomly selected country, and your job is to figure out where you end up. So, here you are in some new country, and all countries are equally likely. You make a list of places and probabilities that you're in those places (all equally likely at about 1/200 for 200 countries). You look around and appear to be in a restaurant. Some countries have more restaurants (per capita/per land area) than others, so you decrease the odds that you're in Algeria or Sudan and increase the odds that you're in Singapore or other high-restaurant-density places. That is, you just multiply the probability that you were in a country with the probability of finding oneself in a restaurant in that country, given that one were already in the country, to obtain the new probability. After a few moments, the waitress brings you sushi, so you decrease the odds for Tajikistan and Paraguay and correspondingly increase the odds on Japan, Taiwan, and such places where sushi restaurants are relatively common. You pick up the chopsticks and try the sushi, discovering that it's excellent. Japan is now by far the most likely place, and though it's still possible that you're in the United States, it's not nearly as likely (sadly for the US). Those "probabilities" are getting really hard to read with all those zeros in front. All that matters is the relatively likelihood, so perhaps you scale that last column by the sum of the whole column. Now it's a probability again, and it looks something like this: Now that you're pretty sure it's Japan, you make a new list of places inside Japan to see if you can continue to narrow it down. You write out Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya, Hamamatsu, Tokyo, Sendai, Sapporo, etc., all equally likely (and maybe keep Taiwan too, just in case). Now the waitress brings unagi. You can get unagi anywhere, but it's much more common in Hamamatsu, so you increase the odds on Hamamatsu and slightly decrease the odds everywhere else. By continuing in this manner, you may eventually be able to find that you're eating at a delicious restaurant in Hamamatsu Station -- a rather lucky random draw.

Your next trip could be planned by... artificial intelligence? A new startup called Lola aims to revolutionize the concept of travel agents by making trip booking as easy as texting a friend. The company, which was started by Kayak founder Paul English, officially launches for iPhones Thursday, with a small team of travel bookers who will rely on super-powered artificial intelligence algorithms that will help them manage as many as hundreds of clients at once. Here's how it works: After setting up an account--and punching in credit card details--Lola users can simply message a representative through the app, whether they need a simple round trip to Chicago or want to plan a weeklong hiking expedition through Indonesia. While a traditional booking site would make you type in dates, preferences, and countless other parameters, Lola promises to simplify the process by letting users make requests in conversational language: You might type "need a flight to O'Hare next weekend" instead of punching info into little boxes.

You may consider yourself an awesome drone pilot, able to fly skillfully at breakneck speed while dodging hazardous obstacles with a few nimble finger movements, but how would you deal with a steamed up eagle, or a chimp with a stick? Filming a historical reenactment at a recent festival in the Lipetsk region in central Russia, some poor drone pilot clearly got a little too close to the action. Watch carefully and you can see the spear-wielding guy on the ground, in full period costume, launch his weapon skyward. We have to say, it was an impressive throw, scoring as it did a perfect hit on the flying machine, sending it crashing to the ground. The video comes courtesy of Russia Today, though the news site offers few details of the reenactment event, or, more importantly, the drone calamity.

Drones have emerged in recent years as one of the hottest modern technologies. They're used for purposes as varied as monitoring crop health and tracking construction projects, endangered animals and missing persons. A reenactor at Rusborg in Lipetsk, Russia, threw a spear at a drone filming the festival devoted to the Middle Ages, causing the quadcopter to tumble to the ground. Pavel Semyonov, an organizer of the event, later explained on social media that at the time of the drone crash, participants were full of adrenaline because of a nearby weapons contest. The man who caused the drone to crash apologized for the incident and compensated the drone owner for the damaged property, according to Semyonov and the company shooting the video.

Every child gets a vision and hearing check in school on a regular basis. Dr. Moshe Fried, an Israeli plastic surgeon, believes an annual skin check is necessary as well, starting in the teens. This is why he agreed to be the medical consultant for Emerald Medical Applications' DermaCompare, a free smartphone app that can detect changes in marks and moles over time. The app alerts the user to changes that ought to be screened for cancer. "The skin is the biggest organ in the body," said Fried.

They're all the rage: Kik has them, Facebook wants them, and it seems like every computer coder wants to make them. And why is every company suddenly hot on this new A.I. trend? Bots are simple artificial intelligence systems that you interact with via text. Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a bot to give you a weather report, or more complex, like having one troubleshoot a problem with your internet service. A lot of factors have come together to make this explosion of bots possible.

The Tiangong 3 space station will be completed no latter than 2022, just as the International Space Station enters into retirement. The Tiangong 3's three 20 ton modules will be boosted into space by the LM-5 heavy space rocket. The China Manned Space Agency released several Powerpoint slides showing a closer look at the Tiangong 3, China's planned space station. Scheduled to be commissioned in 2022, the Tiangong 3 will be regularly visited by Shenzhou manned space vessels, and automated Tianzhou resupply vehicles. The Tianhe 1 will be the core module of the Tiangong 3 space station, with a robotic arm (yellow, on the bottom), docking ports (located in the copper color coded section) and the storage section (color coded white) has internal modular racks for storing supplies and scientific experiments.

The New York Times has a lead article on collapsing US merger deals in 2016 so far. While last year set a record for the amount of money spent on corporate mergers -- 4.7 trillion -- this year is so far setting a very different record: the dollar amount of deals that have come undone, the famous paper writes. Since the beginning of January, 400 billion worth of corporate mergers have been withdrawn in the United States, almost three times the previous record for the same period, set in 2007, according to Dealogic, which analyzes such data. In the same paper, reporter John Markoff writes that the Pentagon is turning to Silicon Valley for the edge in Artificial Intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year.

A couple of years ago, Andy Rubin--the celebrated creator of Android and until recently the head of Google's mobile Internet efforts--helped his wife, Rie, build a bakery in a decommissioned train station in Los Altos, California. They called it Voyageur du Temps, French for time traveler. As the name suggests, the bakery conveys visitors to an earlier era--by painstakingly re-creating the flavors and textures of classic European pastry. To pull this off, the Rubins went so far as to hire chefs from Japan, where traditional baking techniques are rigorously studied, and to purchase a rare Bongard Cervap oven, one of only two on the West Coast. The project was typical Rubin, in that it involved throwing an almost comical amount of money, energy, and engineering talent at a hobby, just for the fun of it. But it was also atypical Rubin, in that he usually marshals such resources to build artifacts from the future--like the robotic arm and the retinal scanner he's installed in his house. Even at his backward- looking bakery, Rubin couldn't resist adding some forward-leaning touches. He began writing software for a "closed cash" device that could receive payment, dole out change, and log transactions without a cashier's intervention. And he built a private meeting room in the back, complete with a homemade magnetized lock system.

Automation and industrial robots have been in the manufacturing and related industries for decades, with the usage prevalent in shop floors and assembly lines. In 2008, a firm called Kiva Systems invented suitcase-like machines that would park underneath racks and move them around in the warehouse. Raffaello D' Andrea, the co-founder of Kiva, said: "You don't have to walk over to the shelves to get things -- the shelves come to you." Amazon acquired Kiva Systems four years later to obtain the technology to sort, organise and transport Amazon's massive inventory. Without a doubt, technology has reduced the need for human labour, especially in manual and routine tasks. It has largely done its job -- simplifying tasks and minimising errors -- although at the expense of eliminating low-skilled factory workers.