Welcome to another edition of In the Loop, the Los Angeles Times' theme park newsletter. I'm Funland theme park blogger Brady MacDonald, and this week, we drop in on the Wizarding World grand opening, taste-test Disney's Food and Wine Festival, bid farewell to the last-remaining Back to the Future ride and marvel at Phantasialand's visually stunning new coaster. Times columnist Mary McNamara writes that Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood is the place where "magic comes to life, or as close as it gets." For those who have never been on the world's best dark ride, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey turns the traditional dark ride experience on its head by placing riders on the end of a unique robotic arm. The often-overlooked Flight of the Hippogriff at Wizarding World is a short but fun ride that's perfect for young kids eager to climb aboard their first roller coaster.

TROISDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's Deutsche Post is testing robots that could help postal workers cope with increasing numbers of parcels on their delivery rounds, a company manager said on Thursday. The volume of parcels being delivered by Deutsche Post in Germany is rising steadily as more and more Germans buy goods online from retailers such as Amazon.com That is making up for declining letter volumes, but posing problems due to the larger size of items involved. "Robots could be used in deliveries in three to five years' time," Clemens Beckmann, head of innovation at the group's parcel and letter division, said in an interview with Reuters. The robots, which look like a table on wheels on which goods can be placed, would follow delivery workers, helping them to transport and carry heavy parcels. If the postie stops walking, the robot stops too, and it only starts again when they move on.

Log in Sign up p Discover and save creative ideas p Discover even br more ideas Just a few br more details... p Continue p Creating an account means you're okay with … The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google's Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. NVIDIA proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers. When Microsoft's Tay, the artificially intelligent bot, was taught to be a racist Holocaust-denier by the online masses, traditional publishers got a … Humans have a long and storied history of freaking out over the possible effects of our technologies. Long ago, Plato worried that writing would hurt people's memories and "implant forgetfulness in their souls." More recently, Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein's monster warned us against playing … A brief and broken reappearance.

Six teams of self-driving semi trucks finished long-distance journeys across western Europe Thursday morning, The Guardian reports, marking a major milestone in autonomous vehicle technology. The trucks left from countries like Sweden and Germany and ended their trip in The Netherlands. Humans weren't totally taken out of the equation in achieving the feat. The trucks were essentially playing "follow the leader," with a group of driverless semis matching the speed and overall route set by a human driver in the vehicle up front. Still, this so-called "platooning" maneuver can result in benefits like less traffic (as the trucks can drive much closer to one another) and increased fuel efficiency, meaning a potentially greener shipping industry.

If its first quarter is anything to go by, 2016 may be shaping up historically as the 1491 of space discovery. The month preceding Valentine's Day alone provided what would once have been a year's worth of cosmic news. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took one giant leap toward a new Age of Discovery by relaunching and landing a rocket that had already made a round-trip journey through the stratosphere – a revolutionary moment in private space exploration. A pair of researchers kicked off a frenzied planet hunt by demonstrating that a massive, heretofore undetected planet could be lurking on the outer edge of our solar system. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested that unforeseen effects of rapid scientific progress might, paradoxically, cause the extinction of life on Earth in the next thousand years or so, adding, "By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." And scientists announced they'd detected gravitational waves, evidence of a billion-year-old collision between black holes, thus confirming the final and most obscure principle of Einstein's theory of relativity – and opening a window that may soon offer a glimpse of the universe's very creation.

A new eGames international gaming tournament will make its debut in Rio during this summer's Olympic Games. The event, launched as part of this week's London Games Festival, offers medals and national pride rather than cash prizes for the winners. The competition, backed by the UK government, will be run by the new International eGames Committee (IEGC). Britain, Canada, Brazil and the USA are the only confirmed entrants so far with more expected to follow. In Olympic years, both summer and winter, the eGames will take place in the host cities - with future tournaments planned for Pyeongchang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2020.

Back in Hannover Messe 2011, Germany announced the Industry 4.0 concept and initiated the world's fourth industrial revolution. Since then, Hannover Messe has become a focal point for Industry 4.0 innovations. As Hannover Messe 2016 closes in, the exhibition will once again be surrounded by various Industry 4.0-related hot topics such as integrated industry, smart manufacturing and more. Coming soon on April 25 to 29, Hannover Messe 2016 will be based on the theme "Integrated Industry – Discover Solutions", which aims to provide an interpretation of the smart manufacturing model of Industry 4.0. As a Taiwanese company with deep expertise in IoT automation, NEXCOM has planned four themed demonstrations that map out a complete solution blueprint for industry 4.0 in the upcoming event. Joe Lin, General Manager of NEXCOM's IoT Automation Solutions Business Group, states, "Early Industry 4.0 solutions focused on the lower layers of factory communication where IoT gateways were used to integrate different industrial protocols, bridging the Industry 4.0 last mile connection to fulfill the'connected' concept.

"The new trend is to describe a traditional business and then add the words'AI.' A few years back, it was'social'." But in certain sectors, adding AI into the mix indeed means revolutionizing it. Perhaps no more is this change happening than in the banking sector. The recent PAPIs Connect brought together the academics and business people alike to talk about how predictive APIs are making artificial intelligence, machine learning and even deep learning more accessible.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been getting a lot of media attention lately, from Google's AlphaGo to Microsoft and Facebook's photo recognition for the blind. But being able to analyze and learn from cold hard facts is one thing. Being able to derive something creative out of it is a whole different ballpark. But that's exactly what Microsoft and some partners accomplished when they let a computer "paint" an entirely new original piece of art just after analyzing Rembrandt's existing corpus. The two-year project, which was aptly called "New Rembrandt", involved Microsoft, financial firm ING, Delft University of Technology, and the Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis Dutch art museums.