Since joining UCLA's faculty in 1988, urology researcher Arie Belldegrun has developed a specialty: starting companies with the university's help. Belldegrun's track record includes selling his first company, the Santa Monica cancer therapy biotech Agensys Inc., for more than $500 million. In 2009, Belldegrun's Cougar Biotechnology was sold to Johnson & Johnson, for $1 billion. He's still running the cancer cell therapy firm, Kite Pharma, which recently ranked seventh in the MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies. Belldegrun, 67, thinks most universities would have forced him to choose between being a full-time professor or an entrepreneur.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict which embryos will result in IVF success. In a new study, AI was found to be more accurate than embryologists at pinpointing which embryos had the potential to result in the birth of a healthy baby. Experts from Sao Paulo State University in Brazil have teamed up with Boston Place Clinic in London to develop the technology in collaboration with Dr Cristina Hickman, scientific adviser to the British Fertility Society. They believe the inexpensive technique has the potential to transform care for patients and help women achieve pregnancy sooner. During the process, AI was "trained" in what a good embryo looks like from a series of images.

Yuan Wang, co-founder of American Marine Research Company, details the progress his company is making in developing automated drones to identify and catch lionfish. An engineer at American Marine Research Company works on a drone on Thursday, June 29, 2017. The company is designing robots to autonomously detect and collect lionfish. PENSACOLA, Fla. -- There's a potential game changer brewing in the struggle to eradicate lionfish from the Gulf of Mexico. A quartet of engineers is developing drones to autonomously detect and collect lionfish at depths beyond the scope of human divers.

Nasa isn't about to announce it has made contact with aliens, despite a hugely viral video, the agency has confirmed. The video – posted on an account associated with the hacking collective Anonymous – had claimed that Nasa was "on the verge" of making a new announcement on the discovery of alien life. The long and sometimes rambling footage used a range of evidence to suggest that the agency had discovered something that it would be making public soon. But Nasa has now confirmed that, as thought, there's no new evidence of life on Earth. At least according to senior scientist Thomas Zurbuchen, upon whose comments much of the video was based.

Anonymous claims Nasa is about to announce it has found alien life. The truth is a little more complicated – but no less wondrous. An account affiliated with the hacking and activism collective has released a viral video claiming Nasa is "on the verge" of detailing contact with extraterrestrial species. It takes much of its evidence from the work the space agency is doing to explore space and look for alien worlds across the universe. And while such claims might overestimate just how quickly the discovery will emerge, they are based in the truth.

His impact on artificial intelligence research has been so deep that some people in the field talk about the "six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton" the way college students once referred to Kevin Bacon's uncanny connections to so many Hollywood movies. Dr. Hinton's students and associates are now leading lights of artificial intelligence research at Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber, and run artificial intelligence programs at the University of Montreal and OpenAI, a nonprofit research company. "Geoff, at a time when A.I. was in the wilderness, toiled away at building the field and because of his personality, attracted people who then dispersed," said Ilse Treurnicht, chief executive of Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, an innovation center that will soon house the Vector Institute, Toronto's new public-private artificial intelligence research institute, where Dr. Hinton will be chief scientific adviser. Dr. Hinton also recently set up a Toronto branch of Google Brain, the company's artificial intelligence research project. His tiny office there is not the grand space filled with gadgets and awards that one might expect for a man at the leading edge of the most transformative field of science today.

Today, SpaceX will hopefully launch and land a Falcon 9 rocket that it's already flown to space. The launch window opens at 2:10 PM and lasts for two hours; launch time is currently scheduled for 3:10 PM ET. You can livestream the launch, with commentary, at SpaceX's website. This mission is called BulgariaSat-1 and will carry Bulgaria's first geostationary communications satellite into a high geostationary orbit around the Earth. It's launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and a drone ship called "Of Course I Still Love You" will be waiting in the Atlantic Ocean for the Falcon 9's first-stage landing. If things don't go as planned, there's another launch window tomorrow at 2:10 PM ET.

There are flying cars and Concorde's would-be supersonic successor, a company offering to deliver cargo to the Moon - for a mere $1.2 million per kilogram - and the latest in funky futuristic aviation ideas, both big and small. No doubt about it: the Paris Air Show is an aerospace geek's paradise. But with everything from the smallest drones to the largest passenger jets on display, it's tough to sift through it all. So here's a guide to some of the cool things that caught our eye this week. Visitors looks at the flying car Pegasus 1, built by French entrepreneur Jerome Dauffy at Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, east of Paris, France, Tuesday, June 20, 2017 in Paris.

The US military says it has shot down an armed, Iran-made drone that had been bearing down on its forces near a garrison in Syria's southeast. In the latest sign of increasingly frequent confrontation with Damascus and its allies, Tuesday's incident closely followed Sunday's US downing of a piloted Syrian army jet in the southern Raqqa countryside after it dropped bombs near US-backed forces. The Pentagon said a US F-15 aircraft, flying over Syrian territory, fired on the drone after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it had "dirty wings", meaning it was armed. "I can tell you it was an Iranian-made drone," Davis said, declining to speculate on who was operating it.

We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian parameter inference in non-linear state-space models with intractable likelihoods. Sequential Monte Carlo with approximate Bayesian computations (SMC-ABC) is one approach to approximate the likelihood in this type of models. However, such approximations can be noisy and computationally costly which hinders efficient implementations using standard methods based on optimisation and Monte Carlo methods. We propose a computationally efficient novel method based on the combination of Gaussian process optimisation and SMC-ABC to create a Laplace approximation of the intractable posterior. We exemplify the proposed algorithm for inference in stochastic volatility models with both synthetic and real-world data as well as for estimating the Value-at-Risk for two portfolios using a copula model. We document speed-ups of between one and two orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for posterior inference.