Bolstered by a bevy of marketing partners and the exhibition muscle of its parent company's cinema chain, Legendary Entertainment's "Warcraft" smashed its way into the box-office record books last week in China, earning 156 million in its first five days in theaters. The long-awaited fantasy film based on Blizzard Entertainment's popular "Warcraft" video game series occupied nearly two-thirds of all screens on the mainland upon its opening Wednesday, with 120,000 screenings alone on its first day in theaters – a record, according to Dalian Wanda, which purchased Legendary this year. The opening-week performance of "Warcraft" already has outstripped the entire China runs of other major Hollywood films released this year including "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and "Kung Fu Panda 3." And the movie's China receipts have been some six times greater than its domestic earnings. Near the end of "Warcraft" -- an elaborate, exhausting cinematic collision of humans and Orcs, live actors and digital extras, geek enthusiasms and multiplex dollars -- the director Duncan Jones grants us a breather from all the thundering mayhem. Near the end of "Warcraft" -- an elaborate, exhausting cinematic collision of humans and Orcs, live actors and digital extras, geek enthusiasms and multiplex dollars -- the director Duncan Jones grants us a breather from all the thundering mayhem.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place in San Francisco, where Tim Cook and other executives are expected to reveal changes to Apple operating systems, give Siri a bigger role, and make the App Store more compelling for developers. We'll be live-blogging here, as our reporters at the Bill Graham Auditorium, follow the coverage. Thanks the audience and Apple community and ends WWDC. App varies from teaching young people simple code to introducing more complicated coding features. "Swift Playground will revolutionize the way people learn to code," Cook said.

Once a year, when Slava Epstein was growing up in Moscow, his mother took him to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, a showcase for the wonders of Soviet life. The expo featured many things--from industrial harvesters to Uzbek wine--but Epstein, who began going in the nineteen-sixties, when he was eight or nine, was interested primarily in one: the Cosmos Pavilion, a building the size of a hangar, with a ceiling shaped like a giant inverted parabola. Space fever was running high in the city. Since 1961, when Yuri Gagarin orbited the globe, unmanned vessels had been launched toward Mars and Venus. Beside the expo's entrance, the towering Monument to the Conquerors of Space depicted a probe swooping up to the heavens. The Pavilion displayed futuristic technology--Vostok rockets and Soyuz orbiters--but Epstein was less interested in the glories of advanced thruster design than in the glories of space. He wanted to devote himself to astronomy. When a textbook that he found on the topic began with algebraic formulas, he prodded his older brother to explain them. During high school, he enrolled in classes in physics and math at Moscow State University. His parents disapproved of his desired career: because he is half Jewish, Epstein would face harsh Soviet quotas limiting Jews in the study of physics, a field deemed relevant to national security. But after his first lecture the professor invited him for a walk, and affirmed what they had been saying all along. "Don't do it," he warned. Soviet Russia may have been a fatalist's paradise, but from a young age Epstein felt that he was hardwired for optimism. He convinced himself that what is truly important in science is the ability to connect ideas, no matter the field, and so he took up biology. Rather than telescopes, he would use microscopes, which he began taking with him on trips to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, to study protozoa along the shore--research that could be conducted with minimal state interference. Over time, he grew interested in even smaller, more ancient forms of life: bacteria. Studying microbes inevitably causes a reordering of one's perceptions: for more than two billion years, they were the only life on this planet, and they remain in many ways its dominant life form. To a remarkable extent, the microbial cosmos was less explored than the actual cosmos: precisely how the organisms evolve, replicate, fight, and communicate remains unclear. Nearly all of microbiology, Epstein eventually learned, was built on the study of a tiny fraction of microbial life, perhaps less than one per cent, because most bacteria could not be grown in a laboratory culture, the primary means of analyzing them. By the time he matured as a scientist, many researchers had given up trying to cultivate new species, writing off the majority as "dark matter"--a term used in astronomy for an inscrutable substance that may make up most of the universe but cannot be seen.

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

Technically, the E3 kicks off Tuesday, June 14, but we all know that much of the show's biggest news out will be announced before the show floor opens, at the parade of publisher "keynote" press conferences in the days prior to the show. With more and more publishers broadcasting live-streams, there will be more live content coming out of this year's show than ever before. We've rounded up some of the biggest broadcasts, including all of the press conferences, so you can follow along the news as it happens, hassle-free. As you may or may not have heard, EA backed out of E3 this year. Instead, it hosted its own fan event, EA Play, adjacent to the show.

Thousands of openings in artificial intelligence and machine learning posted on job boards are going unfilled. In fact, though AI is one of the fastest-growing areas for high-tech professionals, according to a recent Kiplinger report, there are too few qualified engineers. "Supply is far lower than demand," says Boris Babenko, a machine vision engineer at Orbital Insight, a company in Palo Alto, Calif., that uses AI to make sense of data gathered from satellite images. "That's true of all software engineering, but AI is a niche on top of that." The need for AI specialists exists in just about every field as companies seek to give computers the ability to think, learn, and adapt.

"What better way to find out if you're soul mates than being trapped in a room for 60 minutes under extreme pressure?" Mink was workshopping marketing lines for her and co-creator David Aldhouse's new live-action room-escape game Enter the Oubliette, a dystopian-themed puzzle-solving group experience, based in a converted office building in Brixton. But to me, this sounded like an efficient way to mix business and pleasure. I needed a venue for a looming first date, I knew the guy played video games, and I figured that, whatever happens, I may at least get an article out of it. Clearly, I'm a born romantic.

Driving on today's roadways jammed with automobiles, it is easy to understand the challenges of integrating automated vehicles into the flow of traffic. How do you mix driverless vehicles with the difficult-to-predict movements of vehicles driven by people? How do you convince people to give up the sense of freedom that comes from driving themselves? Clean, electric, robot vehicles would be like R2D2's with seats. If we could use today's roads without human drivers, clean, electric, robot vehicles could already successfully navigate our cities, like R2D2s with seats.

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

Pepper is a child-height human-shaped robot described as having been designed to be a genuine companion that perceives and acts upon a range of human emotions. SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant, acquired Aldebaran Robotics and commissioned the development of Pepper. Subsequently SoftBank joint ventured with Alibaba and Foxconn to form a development, production and marketing entity for the robots. There has been much fanfare about Pepper, particularly about it's ability to use its body movement and tone of voice to communicate in a way designed to feel natural and intuitive. The number of Peppers sold to date is newsworthy.