Did you know there is a 25% chance your cause of death will be due to environmental pollution? According the World Health Organization, some 12.6 million people--or nearly 1 in 4 worldwide--died in 2012 due to living or working in unhealthy conditions. In addition, environmental degradation seriously affects overall quality of life and the balance of Earth's ecosystems through loss of forests, open spaces, marine environments and biodiversity. While technological growth and industrialization historically contributed to such problems, the latest technologies--from robotics to artificial intelligence to biotechnology--will also help create healthier and greener industries benefiting both people and planet. While affordable electric and hybrid cars will help reduce pollution and use of fossil fuels, self-driving cars will make our whole transportation and logistics systems more efficient. Cars, trucks, ships, drones and jets that drive or pilot themselves and wirelessly communicate with each other can coordinate and optimize delivery of people and goods in ways requiring less energy.

The American-led U.N. command on Saturday dismissed as unsubstantiated accusations from North Korea that U.S. troops at a border village tried to provoke its frontline troops with "disgusting acts." A North Korean military statement Friday warned U.S. soldiers to stop what it called "hooliganism" at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom or they'll meet a "dog's death any time and any place." It said U.S. troops pointed their fingers at North Korean soldiers and made strange noises and unspecified "disgusting" facial expressions. It also said that American troops encouraged South Korean soldiers to aim their guns at the North. A statement from Christopher Bush, a spokesman for the U.N. command, said they looked into the allegations and determined they were unsubstantiated.

A workaholic moderate, who set aside dreams of a storybook inauguration to pursue a diplomatic career, meets a hopelessly single-issue candidate chasing his last shot at relevance. Throw in a wacky, albeit divided, party and an amorous ex-President who dredges up all kinds of unpleasant memories, and you have the sleeper hit of the season! Thematically, this film is underscored by decades of entrenched sexism and anti-socialism, though the talking points are the same as the 2008 original. "The Best (No, Seriously) the Greatest-Ever Exotic Marigold Hotel--I Mean It, It's Classy" A group of disenfranchised retirees book a stay at a destination resort built by a famed real-estate developer. But they soon discover that he didn't actually build it himself but licensed his name to the project.

Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory. During his acceptance lecture, at an international symposium in Chicago, he discussed the prize's namesake, who died in 2001. Claude Shannon: Born on the planet Earth (Sol III) in the year 1916 A.D. Generally regarded as the father of the information age, he formulated the notion of channel capacity in 1948 A.D. Within several decades, mathematicians and engineers had devised practical ways to communicate reliably at data rates within one per cent of the Shannon limit. As is sometimes the case with encyclopedias, the crisply worded entry didn't quite do justice to its subject's legacy. That humdrum phrase--"channel capacity"--refers to the maximum rate at which data can travel through a given medium without losing integrity.

SEOUL/UNITED NATIONS – The American-led U.N. command on Saturday dismissed accusations from North Korea that U.S. troops at a border village tried to provoke its front-line troops with "disgusting acts." A North Korean military statement Friday warned U.S. soldiers to stop what it called "hooliganism" at Panmunjom or they will meet a "dog's death any time and any place." It said U.S. troops pointed their fingers at North Korean soldiers and made strange noises and unspecified "disgusting" facial expressions. It also said American troops encouraged South Korean soldiers to aim their guns at the North. Christopher Bush, a spokesman for the U.N. command, said it had looked into the allegations and determined they were unsubstantiated.

WHEN Daniel Politeski, an engineer from Vancouver, Canada, approached the check-in desk at the Henn-na Hotel, near Nagasaki, Japan, two staffers were waiting to serve him: Should he approach the young woman in a cream business suit or her colleague, who bore a close resemblance to a Tyrannosaurus Rex? He went with the T-Rex, not just because interacting with a dinosaur seemed novel, or because he liked its bow tie, but because it was the one that spoke English. The young woman took no offense at being bypassed; she, like her reptilian co-worker, was a robot. At the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner in Virginia, which houses a sort of a R&D division for the Hilton hotel group and always has about 30 experiments under way, guests can interact with Connie. Named for Conrad Hilton, the chain's founder, this 2-foot-tall robotic concierge is stationed at the reception desk.

Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed well on specific data streams but certain issues are far from being solved, particularly in large data streams from the WWW where unpredictability of new terms requires adaptation in the vector space model. We present a novel event detection system based on the Incremental Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting incorporated with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Our system could efficiently and effectively adapt to the changes within the data streams of any new terms with continual updates to the vector space model. Regarding miss probability, our proposed novelty detection framework outperforms a recognised baseline system by approximately 16% when evaluating a benchmark dataset from Google News.

A visitor to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona tries on a virtual-reality headset, one of a coming wave of VR devices. SAN FRANCISCO – I love watching people experience virtual reality for the first time. The cumbersome headsets exaggerate their movements as they scan left to right, and then nod up and down. And every time they look in another direction and spot something new, you can almost feel their amazement through the goggles. Lately, I feel as though I've put on a VR headset and never took it off. Because every time I turn, it seems, I spy something truly inspirational.

More than a week after his death, Prince is everywhere. Artists the world over counted him as an influence and mentor, and Japan is no exception. When news of Prince's death broke, Japanese musicians, from pop idols to rappers, tweeted their goodbyes. But what a lot of people may not realize is that Prince also had profoundly affected one of the most bizarre comic and anime franchises Japan has ever produced – a series called, appropriately enough, "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure." The series isn't quite as popular as titles like "One Piece" or "Dragon Ball Z," but it has been running since 1985, spawned video game and novel spinoffs and produced a serious cult following.

Editor's note: This month marks the centennial of the birth of Claude Shannon, the American mathematician and electrical engineer whose groundbreaking work laid out the theoretical foundation for modern digital communications. To celebrate the occasion, we're republishing online a memorable profile of Shannon that IEEE Spectrum ran in its April 1992 issue. Written by former Spectrum editor John Horgan, who interviewed Shannon at his home in Winchester, Mass., the profile reveals the many facets of Shannon's character: While best known as the father of information theory, Shannon was also an inventor, tinkerer, puzzle solver, and prankster. The 1992 profile included a portrait of Shannon taken by Boston-area photographer Stanley Rowin. On this page we're reproducing that portrait along with other Shannon photos by Rowin that Spectrum has never published. Shannon died in 2001 at age 84 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He is regarded as one of the greatest electrical engineering heroes of all time.