New footage of Arecibo Observatory collapsing in the jungle of Puerto Rico shows the moment its main cables snapped and sent a massive platform hurling to the ground - triggering a reaction that led to its destruction. Drones were investigating cables around the telescope when the restraints failed and dropped the 900-ton platform onto to the reflector dish 400 feet below. In one of the videos, the platform begins swaying in the air before letting out a loud roar as it dislodged from the supporting cable and snapping into pieces as it dropped. The second part of the clip is a view of the cables at the top of a support tower, which shows a group of frayed wires and an empty spot where cables were that had previously failed this year. One of the cables begins to strain and then violently flies out of its support, creating a cloud of smoke and debris.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's supreme leader on Saturday demanded the "definitive punishment" of those behind the killing of a scientist who led Tehran's disbanded military nuclear program, as the Islamic Republic blamed Israel for a slaying that has raised fears of reignited tensions across the Middle East. After years of being in the shadows, the image of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suddenly was to be seen everywhere in Iranian media, as his widow spoke on state television and officials publicly demanded revenge on Israel for the scientist's slaying. Israel, long suspected of killing Iranian scientists a decade ago amid earlier tensions over Tehran's nuclear program, has yet to comment on Fakhrizadeh's killing Friday. However, the attack bore the hallmarks of a carefully planned, military-style ambush, the likes of which Israel has been accused of conducting before. The attack has renewed fears of Iran striking back against the U.S., Israel's closest ally in the region, as it did earlier this year when a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general.

As even the most inattentive observer of contemporary international politics will attest, technological competition – mostly, but not always, between the U.S. and its allies on one hand, and China and Russia on the other – has once again risen to the fore. Analysts, so far, have approached this issue from various angles: what it means in terms of military balances, the possibility of international cooperation, what a technological edge implies for domestic policies, and so on. The outgoing Trump administration has made technological contestation with China a cornerstone of its strategic policy, emphasizing the need for the United States to maintain its edge when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information science, and aerospace and other critical technologies, among others. Other Indo-Pacific powers, such as Australia, India, and Japan, have also joined the fray in pushing both new and emerging tech at home as well as promoting collaboration around it between "like-minded countries." In June this year, a Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence of 14 states along with the European Union was launched, to facilitate collective AI research as well as implementation.

We present the results and findings of the First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI). This Shared Task includes two subtasks: country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1) and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2). The data for the shared task covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries and are collected from the Twitter domain. As such, NADI is the first shared task to target naturally-occurring fine-grained dialectal text at the sub-country level. A total of 61 teams from 25 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting the interest of the community in this area. We received 47 submissions for Subtask 1 from 18 teams and 9 submissions for Subtask 2 from 9 teams.

Perched in his fire tower high above the pine trees, Nick Dutton leans back and nods to the cascading hills and mountains behind him. "I love being out here, just away from stuff," he says. "I mean, you can't really complain." Dutton, a fire tower operator, is sitting in his office, a tiny cabin propped high above the treetops by metal supports that sway with the wind. His walls are littered with compass points and references, each a guide to the bush stretching in every direction along the eastern ACT-NSW border.

In 1997, The Simpsons prophesized that for future wars, "most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots" with soldiers only responsible to "build and maintain those robots." Though the cartoon's track record with predictions is debatable, few will argue that robots have played a critical role in combat over the past decade. Whether it is a Predator drone patrolling a No-Fly zone or a Packbot diffusing a bomb, robots have made their presence known on the battlefield. The U.S. military and coalition forces use the base, located in an undisclosed location, to launch airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria, as well as to distribute cargo and transport troops supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. The Predators at the base are operated and maintained by the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, currently attached to the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing.

Applying a machine learning technique to a group of possible storm paths could help meteorologists provide more accurate medium-term hurricane forecasts. This approach could also help them issue timely warnings to communities in the path of these potentially deadly storms, report researchers. In a new study, the researchers used machine learning to remove certain groups of hurricane predictions from ensembles--sets of predictions from weather models that are based on a range of weather possibilities--to lower errors and improve forecasts four to six days ahead. "…WHEN YOU ARE FACING A HURRICANE, IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW WHAT TYPE OF STORM YOU'RE GOING TO GET--AND WHEN YOU'RE GOING TO GET IT." Scientists use these ensemble models because weather is highly complex and trying to forecast even a single event creates huge amounts of data, says Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State. "The models are run slightly differently many, many times to create an ensemble of possible future states of the atmosphere. It's this ensemble that is given to the forecasters," says Evans. "We're looking at 120 different forecasts at every time around the globe, then focusing on an individual typhoon or hurricane and asking, 'What will this storm do in the future?' Now, if you give those predictions to a forecaster only a few hours before their forecast goes live, that's a huge amount of information to process," she says.

My father, Richard Zobel, who has died aged 81, was a pioneering computer scientist at the University of Manchester, birthplace of "Baby", the world's first stored-program computer. He rode the wave of the information technology revolution, starting in the early 1960s on military flight simulators for the electronics and equipment company Sperry's – the valve analog computers they used ran so hot that he had to work in the cool of the night – and in later years recommending improvements to the distant early warning system (Dews) protecting Indian Ocean coastlines from tsunami, but it was his 40-year academic career that defined his professional life. Richard was born in Lewisham, south London, the son of Joan, a dressmaker, and Norman Zobel, a car mechanic, just before the outbreak of the second world war, and narrowly escaped early tragedy when a water tank came through the ceiling and landed on his bed during the blitz. He went to Colfe's school (then a grammar school) on a scholarship, and graduated in 1963 in electrical engineering from London University, sponsored on his sandwich course by Sperry Gyroscope, a UK arm of the US company, which had headquarters in Bracknell. He met Lesley Winks at Peggy Spencer's ballroom dancehall in Penge, and they married in 1964.

An asteroid has flown past Earth closer than any seen before. The tiny object, known as asteroid 2020 QG, came just 1,830 miles over the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday, the space agency said. As it did so, it was spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic camera that scans the sky in search of a variety of objects, from the smallest asteroids to the largest supernova. The asteroid 2020 QG is particularly small. It is about three to six meters across, scientists said, roughly the size of a large car.

Artificial intelligence has been vital in controlling the spread of the coronavirus in the Arabian Gulf, a health conference has been told. Technology has forecast the pandemic's development and informed residents when they have been in contact with infected individuals, the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit heard. The summit was also told that the rapid growth in telemedicine – such as video or telephone consultations – is not likely to be reversed when the pandemic is over. However, experts cautioned that organisations were not doing enough to share vital data that could save lives and certain ethical concerns about the use of data had not been resolved. Dr Esam Al Wagait, director of Saudi Arabia's National Information Centre, said the Kingdom's artificial intelligence (AI) based Covid-19 Index had been crucial in forecasting the virus's spread locally, including which areas would be most heavily affected and how many people would fall ill.