The Egypt Air disaster may have dropped out of the news briefly, but the investigation continues apace to find out why flight MS804 crashed. French investigators think they have heard locator-beacon signals from at least one of the "black box" flight recorders, and now salvage experts are heading to the site to take a closer look. Hearing the beacons is one thing, but they won't know for sure what they have found until they send down a robotic submarine armed with bright lights and cameras. "Black boxes" are, in fact, bright orange and have reflective strips, so they show up pretty well when you shine lights on them. The robotic submarine is on a special salvage ship, called the John Lethbridge.

Chances are, you're already hip-deep in machine-learning applications. It's how Google Photo organizes those pictures from your vacation in Spain. It's how Facebook suggests tags for the pictures you took at last week's soccer match. It's how the cars of nearly every major automaker can help you avoid unsafe lane changes. Machine learning – which enables a computer to learn without new programming – is exploding in its ability to handle highly complex tasks.

A lot can change in the space of 10 years: At the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, match results were predicted by an octopus named Paul. As Euro 2016 prepares to kick off Friday in France, scientists are using advanced neural networks to try to figure out which team will win this summer's big soccer tournament. As fans from across the continent begin their journeys toward France this week, predictions among them will be based on passion, patriotism and hope rather than algorithms, artificial intelligence or machine learning. But that's not stopping companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Blue Yonder from trying to leverage their technology to predict this year's winner. At the World Cup in 2006, Paul the Octopus became a celebrity by accurately predicting the results of every single game involving host country Germany, which went on to win the tournament. Paul's method, though, wasn't what most people would call "scientific."

"Warcraft" just snatched China's all-time midnight presales record from "Furious 7," and it's set to soar to the top of the country's box office as it opens this weekend on more screens than any other film has before. But the video game epic probably won't surpass the car-racing action flick. An estimated one-half of the globe's players of "World of Warcraft" -- the Activision Blizzard video game series on which the movie is based -- live in China, so their enthusiasm was key to setting that presales record. And through late Wednesday, "Warcraft" is off to a sizzling 46 million start in China. Although presales are generally a good proxy for how well a film will do there, the record 391 million haul pulled in by "Furious 7," the highest-grossing Hollywood movie ever in China, should be safe.

Machine Learning and AI are fast becoming ubiquitous in data driven businesses, that is to say, an awful lot of businesses. Here I choose a few areas where it's possible that big corporations haven't already eaten everybody's lunch. It's not uncharted territory -- if I could think of the next killer application, I'd be trying to do it! So-called after the California Gold Rush where the purveyors of picks and shovels made a killing (whereas the outcome for prospectors was mixed), the picks and shovels of machine intelligence are hardware, data feeds,and (arguably) the algorithms themselves. But these processors were designed for graphics.

More details have emerged about the sweeping scope of Google/DeepMind's ambitions for pushing its algorithmic fingers deep into the healthcare sector -- including wanting to apply machine learning processing to UK NHS data within five years. New Scientist has obtained a Memorandum of Understanding between DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust in London, which describes what the pair envisage as a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects". Envisaged benefits of the collaboration include improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety and cost reductions -- the latter being a huge ongoing pressure-point for the free-at-the-point-of-use NHS as demand for its services continues to rise yet government austerity cuts bite into public sector budgets. The MoU sets out a long list of "areas of mutual interest" where the pair see what they dub as "future potential" to work together over the five-year period of collaboration envisaged in the memorandum. The document, only parts of which are legally binding, was signed on January 28 this year.

I met up with founder Ali Parsa at the recent unveiling of a new AI based triage service that aims to make it easier and more effective for patients to take those first steps towards good health. The service was tested both live against experienced doctors and nurses on the day and over a more prolonged period and featured strongly on both occasions. Indeed, the AI system was found to be both more accurate and considerably faster (and therefore cheaper) than human based triage services.

Good science fiction requires close reading. That's what we're discovering as we embark on Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, the first book in her Imperial Radch trilogy. Not only are most gender pronouns "she," but Leckie isn't exactly generous with her world-building--she holds back on explanation in favor of letting readers do the work. Which is, of course, great for our purposes. Read up on our thoughts below, then join us in the comments for further discussion.

Mendix today announced a new version of its low-code mobile development platform, designed to help developers build "Smart Apps" with connectors to accommodate emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and machine learning (ML). A key feature of the new Mendix 7 platform is the inclusion of drag-and-drop connectors that can be used to wire up those IoT, Big Data and ML services. "Without writing any code, developers can seamlessly leverage these component services to make connected things and insights actionable, delivering new experiences for customers, partners and employees," the company said in a statement today. In addition to those built-in connectors, the Mendix 7 platform provides a connector kit so developers can roll their own connectors through the use of a data mapper, native REST API calls, Java extensions and database connectors. The Mendix platform is one of many low-code/no-code industry offerings created to empower "citizen developers" or ordinary business users who need to develop mobile apps to help their organizations keep pace in the new "mobile-first" world where experienced mobile developers are hard to find.

The rich worlds created in the TV series Game of Thrones (GoT) inspired a computer science class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany: As part of their class project, the students developed applications that scour the web for data on Game of Thrones and crunch the numbers. Then they put together a website that reports which characters are most likely to die in the upcoming sixth season of the TV series. Just ahead of the kickoff for season six, the students have implemented a project that answers questions preoccupying fans of the series: Has Jon Snow survived season five? Who is going to die next? The students used an array of machine learning algorithms to answer these questions. The algorithm, which accurately predicted 74 percent of character deaths in the show and books, has many surprises in store, placing a number of characters thought to be relatively safe in grave danger.