Air New Zealand is dipping its toes into artificial intelligence, launching a customer service chatbot that helps passengers with common queries. The airline hopes Oscar, full name Bravo Oscar Tango, will become a "virtual travel assistant", helping passengers through every step of their journey. Oscar will initially help customers with commonly asked queries, which Air New Zealand says will save them time and offer a more personalised experience than searching a traditional Frequently Asked Questions section online. As with other artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Oscar will learn based on the conversations - verbal and text - people have with him, becoming more user-friendly and helpful the more he interacts. Air New Zealand chief digital officer Avi Golan said Oscar had been launched as a beta or early stage product allowing customers to play an active role in training him.

Over the Southern Ocean and remote Australian grasslands, there are flying robots -- drones, actually, but they're not for purposes of counterterrorism or Amazon deliveries. Rather, these unmanned aerial vehicles are being used by research scientists to sidestep time-consuming, labor-intensive work that was once done by foot, boat, or via expensive plane flights: tracking animal behavior. While humans have always been curious to learn about the habits of animals, such research is more pressing than ever. Habitat loss and climate change are having dramatic impact on almost all species -- estimates suggest as many as 1 in 6 species may go extinct due to global warming. The need to know more is urgent, and drones are changing the game by allowing scientists to be more ambitious and efficient with their studies.

Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States. Over five million cases are diagnosed each year, costing the U.S. healthcare system over $8 billion. More than 100,000 of these cases involve melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, which leads to over 9,000 deaths a year, and the numbers continue to grow. Internationally, melanoma also poses a major public health threat. In Australia, there are over 13,000 new instances of melanoma yearly, leading to more than 1,600 deaths.

Gab Scanu works alone, with a special operating licence for his UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia. The 20-year-old's drone photography shows a new perspective on well-known locations such as Sydney's Bondi beach, Mona Vale and other famous coastlines on the country's east coast. He has also travelled abroad and shot the LA coast at Malibu. The son of a cinematographer, Scanu has inherited a keen eye for photographic composition, capturing both the dramatic and the picturesque qualities of the Australian summer experience. He has developed a unique style and feel, using a combination of post production and drone technology to capture often never-before-seen landscape views.

I often sit back and watch certain things quietly. This past week has been one of those moments. An article this weekend in the British media brought up the old and oft disproven argument about the"warming pause." However, as scientists dug into this latest desperate "Hail Mary" pass, it was apparent that there was more to this latest saga. My colleagues Phil Plait at Blastr and Andrew Freedman at Mashable have written excellent pieces laying out how scientists debunked these latest claims. They also fill in other pieces to this rather odd story.

Machine learning is gaining momentum and whether we want to admit it or not, it has become an essential part of our lives. As Adam Geitgey, Director of Software Engineering at Groupon, told JAXenter a few months ago, "anyone who knows how to program can use machine learning tools to solve problems." I think that in five years, machine learning won't be thought of as "magic" anymore. It will be a very common tool that nearly all programmers use to solve problems – just like how most programmers today know about databases and networking. Geitgey explained that even if you don't need a deep mathematical background to be able to apply machine learning, learning Python --"by far the most popular programming language today for machine learning"-- is a must.

A warning went out to millions of parents today that schoolchildren could be sending nude selfies after being groomed by paedophiles through a teenage dating app. The children are being lured into sending sexual, 'inappropriate' images of themselves through the Mylol website and mobile dating app. It's feared'pervert' adults are tricking teenagers into sending naked images of themselves. A warning went out to millions of parents today that schoolchildren could be sending nude selfies after being groomed by paedophiles through teenage dating app Mylol. The dating app and site has been labelled as'Tinder for teens' by concerned parents Mylol is a site described as the'number one teen dating site in the US, Australia, UK and Canada.'

A cable designed to drag space junk out of orbit has failed to deploy from a Japanese spacecraft. More than half a million pieces of debris are currently whizzing around our planet, including abandoned satellites and fragments of old spacecraft. They pose a danger to working satellites and new space vehicles. Scientists are working on a range of clean-up solutions, including cables, nets, harpoons, sails and robotic arms. All are designed to capture pieces of space junk and tug them down into Earth's atmosphere where they will burn up and disintegrate.

A humpback whale may be a huge creature to the human eye, but they're still tough to spot from space. Until recently, the necessary high-resolution satellite technology wasn't readily available, but as the ABC report, researchers in Western Australia are beginning to use satellite imagery to check on the size of local populations. The aim of the project is to keep tabs on Western Australia's humpback whale numbers, explained Curt Jenner, managing director of the Centre for Whale Research. "The goal of the project is ultimately to make sure this population of humpback whales, which has always historically been the largest in the world, is still viable and has recovered to its full potential," he said. The animals were hunted almost to extinction in the early to mid 20th century.

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand.