A team of Nevada scientists have been using a drone to control the weather. Engineers and meteorologists say they have created the first autonomous cloud seeding platform that could increase rainfall by 15 per cent. Cloud seeding involves spraying fine particles of silver iodide into a cloud system in an effort to boost the amount of rain that falls. A team of Nevada scientists have been using drones to control the weather. Microscopic particles of silver iodide are shot into existing clouds using land based generators or aircraft.

The Times has assembled a panel of distinguished and diverse writers who will regularly contribute to the Books section. The 10 authors who make up the Los Angeles Times Cultural Critics At Large have published works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. They have won dozens of prizes. A majority have deep connections to Southern California, even though they hail from four different nations. They will help expand the literary conversation, challenging ideas and broadening readers' understanding of literature and culture within the contemporary moment.

Amazon thrilled comic book fans recently when it announced it was moving forward with its revival of "The Tick," a new live-action series based on the comics by Ben Edlund that have already spawned an animated series, a short-lived live-action series (both on Fox) and a video game. Rumors have swirled for several years, and the streaming content provider announced March 10 that it had ordered a pilot for a new take on the comics, featuring an all new cast. Stepping into the considerable footsteps of Patrick Warburton, who served as the voice of the animated Tick and embodied the live-action version of the character, is British actor Peter Serafinowicz ("Guardians of the Galaxy," "Shaun of the Dead.") Say what you will about "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (and people have said plenty), at 2 hours and a 33 minutes -- packing in three of the comic-book realm's biggest icons, a psychotic supervillain, a giant alien monster and more plot threads than you can shake a kryptonite-tipped spear... Say what you will about "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (and people have said plenty), at 2 hours and a 33 minutes -- packing in three of the comic-book realm's biggest icons, a psychotic supervillain, a giant alien monster and more plot threads than you can shake a kryptonite-tipped spear... In news that may leave fans questioning the direction of the latest reboot of "The Tick," creator Ben Edlund says the new series would have a slightly different tone than expected. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Edlund remarked, "We've got this show about superheroes [where] we get to have fun with the idea of superheroes," before going on to say that the series would be, "darker and more grounded."

Microsoft doubled down on its message of Windows apps that can work on your PC, smartphone or Xbox One during Build 2016, its annual developers conference in San Francisco. Central to this idea was the big Windows 10 Anniversary update, which further opens up the operating system to developers. Chatbots and Cortana were also featured prominently as a potential future for Microsoft in a world that has left the desktop behind. "I am an optimist," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday during the Build 2016 keynote. "We, as a company, are optimistic about what technology can do for us. I believe technology can, in fact, drive economic growth all over the world. I believe technology can empower us in our daily lives. I believe technology can be used to preserve our enduring values."

For two of the datasets we are using a small sample for testing. The OpenStreetMap data is limited to edits in Azerbaijan from 2012 and earlier, and the Git data is just from the Django GitHub repository. The datasets we have selected span a wide range of densities, user and item counts, and types of ratings. Additionally, they provide a wide variety of information about items and users allowing us to explore different methods of extracting content vectors from the datasets.

Last week, Microsoft released an AI chatbot on Twitter with disastrous results. Though the TayTweets robot began life with innocent-enough tweets, it eventually started to spew hateful rhetoric about feminism, immigrants, and even claimed that the Holocaust didn't happen. It was a PR nightmare for Microsoft, and the tech giant eventually pulled the plug on their creation after 15 hours. Out of all the hateful things the chatbot said, there was one which was very amusing considering which company created it. The A.I. was asked whether Sony's PlayStation 4 or Microsoft's own Xbox One was the better system.

First in a series of two articles about the history of signature-based detections, and how the methodology has evolved to identify different types of cybersecurity threats. Used in the context of an outdated and manually intensive technology focused on older classes of threats, there's little wonder why vendors would seek to distance the legacy term "signature" from their advanced detection technology. Vendors haven't necessarily been deceptive in the labeling of their latest generation of techniques; it's often just easier to create a new label for something than to fully explain the context and evolution of what preceded it. Over the years, signature-based systems have changed and advanced, but the core concepts still lie at the heart of all modern detection systems – and will continue to be integral for the foreseeable future. To understand what a "signature system" is in reality, we need to understand the evolution of the detection path as directed and discovered by human intervention.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

Microsoft is hoping to replicate the success of WeChat in China, a messaging app that lets you do things like shop, buy movie tickets and order taxis. Plenty of other companies are also looking closely at bots: Facebook has its M virtual assistant, and Amazon has Alexa, which works like a chatbot even though you actually have to talk to it. The main idea with all of these products is to deliver information, or accomplish simple tasks, without having to deal with an app or website. This new initiative is an important one for Nadella, as it's the first new Microsoft project that he's entirely responsible for. Microsoft will try to prove to developers at Build that it's simple to build bots, and it'll show off demos to prove that they can be useful, like ordering a Domino's pizza.

Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy. Fortunately, a number of Quora Q&As offer an insight into "What does it take to work at Google DeepMind?" and "What is it like to work at Google DeepMind?"