Gen. Igor Konashenkov, says in just one month air defense assets have downed 45 drones targeting the Hemeimeem air base. The base in the province of Latakia serves as the main hub for Russian operations in Syria.

Owning a car means having the freedom to venture at your own pace… it also means a great deal of expenses, and surprisingly a study found that it might be cheaper to Uber in these major cities than to own a car. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has brought Uber back to basics, refocusing on delivering profitable ride-hailing. Uber wants to be more than your first choice for a ride-sharing service: It wants to infiltrate your life, just as Amazon does. The ride-hailing company, now nine years old, is generating revenue growth, and reinvesting that into a variety of expansive ventures – from scooters and bikes to flying taxis. Uber generated $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, up 63 percent from the same period a year ago when revenue was about $1.7 billion.

Cruel robot overlords get more out of their human subjects than nice ones. The mere presence of an unkind robot seems to improve our cognitive abilities, more than being watched by a friendly robot or even no robot at all. The effect of a robot observer on human performance was tested using the Stroop task, a test in which words printed in different colours appear on a screen, and test subjects must identify the colour, ignoring the word itself. We're usually worse at this – either taking longer to answer or making mistakes – when the colour and the word clash, like when the word "blue" is printed in green letters. To see how a robot would affect the test, Nicolas Spatola at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France and his colleagues added a small humanoid robot perceived either as friendly or mean into the experiment.

Twitter is considering wide-ranging changes as it continues to be attacked for promoting conspiracy theorists and far-right activists on its platform, its boss has said. The company is looking into altering the way the service works so that it can limit the way that false stories, misinformation and hate speech are spreading across the site, CEO Jack Dorsey said. But some of its options appear to be controversial already. They include attempting to undermine the idea of filter bubbles by forcing people to see the opinions of people they disagree with – which could include many of the site's discredited and extremist voices. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Artificial intelligence can diagnose eye disease as accurately as some leading experts, research suggests. A study by Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and the Google company DeepMind found that a machine could learn to read complex eye scans and detect more than 50 eye conditions. Doctors hope artificial intelligence could soon play a major role in helping to identify patients who need urgent treatment. They hope it will also reduce delays. A team at DeepMind, based in London, created an algorithm, or mathematical set of rules, to enable a computer to analyse optical coherence tomography (OCT), a high resolution 3D scan of the back of the eye.

A third of businesses believe that artificial intelligence will be widespread in the enterprise by 2028, while a fifth expect that the same will apply to virtual reality and in-vehicle working (due to the rise of autonomous vehicles). A study by TomTom Telematics, a unit of TomTom, shows that while tech developments like AI and VR are coming to the enterprise, business users are wary of the prospect. Almost a third (32 per cent) of respondents said that they thought that they would struggle to keep up with the pace of change - and half (49 per cent) expect that those who do not do so will risk going out of business. TomTom Telematics' director UK & Ireland, Beverley Wise, said, "Companies should be mindful of the pace of change and keep a close eye on the solutions and processes that will help ensure a competitive future - from smart mobility and connected tech to advanced manufacturing and design systems. Many of today's new emerging technologies will disrupt and revolutionise commerce, and in the process become the standard for tomorrow."

ALEXANDRIA, VA.--You knew it was coming, right? When you walk around with more computing power in your pocket than it took to launch a Saturn V rocket to the moon, you get the hint that computers are increasingly doing work that we either don't like doing or never could do before. For example, take logging raw video and creating data files to let news organizations search for just the right clip when we need it. Bingo… the AI system logged it and made it available on the server. AI is also the tool behind giving viewers a better experience when they visit a station's web page.

Britons with regional accents are having to change the way they talk so they can use voice recognition devices such as Alexa. A study found those fed up with repeating requests to devices – including Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, and Siri on the iPhone – have to use a more'standard' form of English instead. Some 79 per cent of those with regional accents regularly alter the way they speak just to be understood by their devices, according to the poll by the Life Science Centre museum in Newcastle upon Tyne. A study found those fed up with repeating requests to devices – including Google Home, Amazon's Alexa (pictured), and Siri on the iPhone – have to use a more'standard' form of English instead. Of the 444 visitors who completed the survey, 33 per cent said they changed the way they spoke'a lot', while 48 per cent expressed concern that use of voice recognition could'stamp out' regional accents.

Maria Pocovi slides her laptop over to me with the webcam switched on. My face stares back at me, overlaid with a grid of white lines that map the contours of my expression. Next to it is a shaded window that tracks six "core emotions": happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness. Each time my expression shifts, a measurement bar next to each emotion fluctuates, as if my feelings were an audio signal. When I look back at Pocovi, I get the sense she knows exactly what I'm thinking with one glance. Petite with a welcoming smile, Pocovi, the founder of Emotion Research Lab in Valencia, Spain, is a global entrepreneur par excellence.

In a café on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a one-time videogame developer turned political theorist named Santiago Siri is trying to explain to me how his nonprofit startup, Democracy.Earth, aims to fix the world's broken politics with the help of the blockchain. The conversation has already covered a dizzying amount of ground. We've discussed the emergence of the Westphalian order of nation-states in the 17th century, Russia's interference in the 2016 US election, the total collapse of Venezuelan society, and Siri's own experience of political corruption in his native Argentina. But he finally boils it all down to one short sentence. "We want to tokenize the like," Siri says.