Dubai, also called the Future City, will start testing aerial taxi transportation later this year. Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority announced the flying drones at the 2017 World Government Summit in February. The agency revealed plans Monday to start trials of its Autonomous Aerial Taxis during this year's fourth quarter. The agency also announced an agreement with the German company Volocopter to operate the autonomous passenger drones. When the project was first announced, the agency was working with drone company EHang for single-passenger autonomous flying vehicles. EHang was then replaced with Volocopter.

Elon Musk has shared a glimpse at what goes on inside the Falcon Factory, where SpaceX's powerful rockets are born. A stunning flythrough video shows different stages of work on the massive boosters, revealing a look at everything from the Merlin engines to what it's like inside the cavity of an unfinished Falcon 9. The footage comes just days after Musk announced the aggressive timeline for the completion and launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket, and the steady hum of machinery can be heard as employees work to bring the firm's space-faring visions to life. Elon Musk has shared a glimpse at what goes on inside the Falcon Factory, where SpaceX's powerful rockets are born. Musk shared the video on Instagram this week, writing, 'Flying through the Falcon Factory.' Components from several Falcon 9 rockets can be seen, with numerous first stage cylinders seen lying throughout the factory floor.

While artificial intelligence stands to bring rapid improvements to the healthcare sector, director-general of the World Health Organisation Margaret Chan has warned that it must be for the good of everybody – not just the wealthiest countries. "What good does it do to get early diagnoses of skin or breast cancer if a country does not provide the opportunity for treatment or if the price of medicines are not affordable?" "Many developing countries don't have health data to mine. And they don't have functioning systems for registering vital causes of death stats. "Enthusiasms for smart machines reflect the perspectives of well-resourced companies and wealthy countries.

Everybody wants a decent photo ID, but French artist Rafael Fabre took the quest to a new level. Rather than just having someone snap him, he built a 3D model of his head and torso, then created a nearly photorealistic rendering of himself for a new project called CNI. He submitted that to the French authorities, who duly issued him a carte nationale identité, never realizing that the image was, as he put it, "practically virtual, a video game version, a fiction." To create the image, Fabre used "techniques used for special effects in movies and in the video game industry." Specifically, he sculpted his head and torso from a bare cube using the 3D modeling program Blender, then adorned the model with clothing purchased from the Turbosquid 3D marketplace.

The spokesman of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ramazan Sharif speaks with media members at the conclusion of his press conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, June 20, 2017. Sharif, said all six ballistic missiles it launched on Syria hit their targets, according to "local sources and drone films." Iran fired ballistic missiles at IS targets in eastern Syria, in the province of Deir el-Zour, later on Sunday. The spokesman of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ramazan Sharif speaks with media members at the conclusion of his press conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, June 20, 2017. Sharif, said all six ballistic missiles it launched on Syria hit their targets, according to "local sources and drone films."

These and many other insights are from the Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution published last week. The report is available for download here (50 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The survey is based on interviews with 3,500 marketers worldwide conducted by Salesforce Research through a third-party survey firm in April 2017. The 3,500 respondents are full-time marketing leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, U.K., Ireland and U.S. Respondents were segmented into high-performing, moderate-performing or under-performing groups. High-performing organizations are defined as those who are "extremely satisfied" with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company's marketing investment.

For aficionados, 2006's Final Fantasy XII was a high point in the three-decades-old series. Part-directed by Yasumi Matsuno, whose intricate stories remain some of Japan's best, it involves directing your squadron of fighters like a football manager, specifying tactics and parameters of behaviour from the sidelines. This HD remaster of the original includes not only higher resolution artwork, but also a rerecorded soundtrack and, most enticingly of all, an overhauled management system, via which you grow your team according to strategy or whim. Splatoon was a surprise, breakout hit for Nintendo: a competitive sports game from a young team of designers that bespeaks philosophical changes at the 127-year-old Japanese company. Two sides compete to cover the majority of the pitch in paint of their team's colour.

When Ubisoft announced last year that the Assassin's Creed series would take a year off, retool, and return in 2017, I anticipated huge sweeping differences. The series needs huge sweeping differences--with a grueling yearly release schedule, Assassin's Creed has suffered from consumer and critical malaise more than perhaps any Ubisoft property. But after playing Assassin's Creed: Origins for 20 or so minutes during E3, I don't think we're getting huge sweeping differences. Assassin's Creed: Origins has been tweaked in places, and its Cleopatra-era Egypt setting is certainly the most creative we've seen in years, but it doesn't feel like a true rebirth or a reimagining. First and foremost, the usual disclaimer applies: We played 20 minutes of an hours-long experience, so maybe the seeds of Assassin's Creed's redemption come later in the game.

The head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration says the boom in drone popularity is'a huge game changer' similar'to powered flight or jet engines.' In an Associated Press interview Tuesday, Michael Huerta said'the growth of this industry and how it's evolving is something that all of us in aviation need to pay a lot of attention to.' Huerta spoke on the sidelines of the Paris Air Show, where drones of all kinds were being displayed. Michael Herta, the head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, speaks at the Paris Air Show on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. In an Associated Press interview, Huerta called the rapid development of the drone industry'a huge game-changer' for aviation. For the industry, their popularity begs a vital question: how do you make sure that swarms of new machines don't endanger each other, other users of the skies and people on the ground as they do everything from patrolling traffic blackspots to, possibly, delivering your burger and fries?

What makes some people smarter than others? A genetic analysis of families in Scotland, UK, hints that brainer people have fewer DNA mutations that impair intelligence and general health, rather than having more genetic variants that make them smarter. "This is one of the most exciting studies on the genetics of intelligence I've seen for a while," says Steve Stewart-Williams of the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, who was not involved in the work. One implication is that using gene editing to fix the hundreds of mutations that slightly damage people's health would make them smarter as well as healthier. "I think this strengthens the moral case for pursuing genome editing technologies," says ethicist Christopher Gyngell of the University of Oxford.