Stunning composite image was created from ten frames Shows ISS transiting the sun at five miles per second on Saturday, Dec. 17, 2016 Shows ISS transiting the sun at five miles per second on Saturday, Dec. 17, 2016 Taken from California, it shows the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second on Saturday, Dec. 17, 2016. Struggle to find the right emoji already? Facebook adds... Now robots can have KIDS: Researchers create machines that... Want to make yourself appear more masculine? Wear deodorant,... Giant space factories and orbiting solar panels could... Struggle to find the right emoji already? Facebook adds... Now robots can have KIDS: Researchers create machines that... Want to make yourself appear more masculine?

Sparks of electricity emanating from a Tesla coil at the Mendeleyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia, January 24, 2016. Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from John Wasik's new book, "Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity from the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla" (Sterling, 2016), slightly edited for this column. World-changing inventions made Nikola Tesla a celebrity in his own time, but something otherworldly makes him transcend his era and remain a perpetual beacon for our civilization 70 years after his death. He's now an immortal rock star, an icon for billionaires, cyberpunks, artists and "maker" inventors who are still fiddling with everyday machines in their basements and garages. Search engine designers, energy czars, musicians, artists and creators everywhere feel his influence.

In 2015, director Justin Kurzel and actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard teamed for a prestigious cinematic adaptation, a bloody, mad take on "Macbeth." Taking on the popular video game "Assassin's Creed" seems like quite the left turn, and while the results aren't as striking as the previous outing -- it's pretty uneven -- the film is thoroughly stamped with Kurzel's unique visual style, which makes for an exciting, if strange ride. There is a complicated and deep mythology behind the game, and the film follows it mostly faithfully. Callum Lynch (Fassbender) is a death row inmate with a violent childhood. He is put to death by lethal injection, but wakes up in a clinic at the shadowy Abstergo corporation.

It started in 1986, in the sort of castle you'd expect one of its characters to climb. In the three decades since it improbably took up within the halls of a 19th century neo-Renaissance Brittany keep, French multinational games publisher Ubisoft has turned out some of gaming's grandest franchises. From Rayman's ghost-limbed antics to the tactically encyclopedic Tom Clancy games, the crypto-byzantine Assassin's Creed series' edgy roof-running to Just Dance's infectious bust-a-moves, Ubisoft has turned quirky, technically involuted concepts into industry exemplars. TIME recently spoke with Ubisoft cofounder, chairman and CEO Yves Guillemot about the company's origins, what he's learned about overreaching, recent threats of hostile takeovers, what interactivity means for the future of the species, and why, of all things, a castle. Actually, the fact that I was surrounded by brilliant and creative people. Brilliant and creative people were really what helped me to continue to go forward.

Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning by David Barber has a chapter on Approximate Sampling Christophe Andrieu et al. have written an introductory tutorial (pdf) on MCMC methods that covers most of the MCMC algorithms Dr. Daphne Koller offers an online course on Coursera, Probabilistic Graphical Models, which also covers the Gibbs Sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm Dr. A. Taylan Cemgil has prepared very useful lecture notes (pdf) for his Monte Carlo methods course

Artificial intelligence (or AI) has permeated most facets of our lives. Algorithms suggest our social media mates. But could the arrival of the robots be applied to education? Jozef Misik, managing director of Knowble, a language tech start-up whose products are built on AI, believes so: "Most educational technology products will have an AI or deep learning component in future," he says. Already, AI is able to address common learning challenges.

This year, many of us let a stranger into our homes and ended up loving it. I am, of course, talking about voice-activated artificial-intelligence assistants. The success of Amazon's Alexa, the launch of Google's Home, and Mark Zuckerbrg's public quest to build his own digital butler all demonstrate that conversational interfaces, which we predicted would be a breakthrough technology in 2016, are here to stay. Amazon's Echo smart speaker, which is a conduit for the company's Alexa AI assistant, was officially available to all in the U.S. from 2015. But this year it also went on sale in the U.K. and Germany, and estimates suggest that it sold as many as two million units in the first nine months of 2016.

As the race to digital accelerates, and as organizations continue to differentiate their products services and interactions, the need for smart and speedy human resources becomes significant. Business complexity has grown from managing simple standard processes and applications to complex, dynamic, and adaptable interactions, processes, and services for better outcomes. AI will make all resources smarter to deal with the increased speed of changes reflected in dynamic goals. This research note reviews five key Cognitive Artificial Intelligence predictions for 2017 and beyond (see Note 1).

Here in the US, trucks carry 10 billion tons of freight each year. That's 70 percent of all goods shipped across the country, according to the American Trucking Association. The trouble is: we don't have enough drivers, and their numbers are dwindling. The American Trucking Association says the driver deficit currently stands at 48,000, and if trends continue, that could reach 175,000 by the year 2024. The average age for an American truck driver is 63, and that's only going up. "Where is the next generation of truckers going to come from?" says Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, a company that helps businesses organize their shipping efforts through trucks as well as ships and trains.

Stock photo company Shutterstock introduced reverse image search for desktop earlier this spring. This made it easy for users to search Shutterstock's website with an image, instead of using keywords. Shutterstock's data scientist Kevin Lester, who looks closely at the adoption of these new tools, was able to find out what patterns emerge from the data. In fact, Lester shared with IBTimes, that those who used reverse-image search for searches wound up making more downloads per search than those from a user with a text-based search. "We've found that users who performed at least one reverse image search prior to making a purchase with Shutterstock were 3.49 times more likely to make a subsequent purchase than those who did not," says Lester.