High-flying balloons are bringing broadband connectivity to remote nations and post-disaster zones where cell towers have been knocked out. These "super-pressure" helium-filled polyethylene bags float 65,000 feet up in the stratosphere, above commercial planes, hurricanes, and pretty much anything else. But keeping a fleet of tennis-court-sized, internet-blasting balloons hovering over one spot has been a tricky engineering problem, just like keeping a boat floating in one place on a fast-moving river. Now researchers at Google spinoff Loon have figured out how to use a form of artificial intelligence to allow the balloon's onboard controller to predict wind speed and direction at various heights, then use that information to raise and lower the balloon accordingly. The new AI-powered navigation system opens the possibility of using stationary balloons to monitor animal migrations, the effects of climate change, or illegal cross-border wildlife or human trafficking from a relatively inexpensive platform for months at a time.

In November of 2018, the South China Morning Post reported that researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences intend to construct an underwater base in the South China Sea. According to the report, not only would the base be populated with AI robots, but the machines are expected to run it autonomously. Aside from this information, most elements of the project have remained under wraps – until now. Now, details are emerging about what could be the world's first Artificial Intelligence colony. With access to prototypes and scientific documents, New Scientists created a picture of what to expect.

But then there was the Chinese game of go (pictured), estimated to be 4000 years old, which offers more "degrees of freedom" (possible moves, strategy, and rules) than chess (2 10170). As futurist George Gilder tells us, in Gaming AI, it was a rite of passage for aspiring intellects in Asia: "Go began as a rigorous rite of passage for Chinese gentlemen and diplomats, testing their intellectual skills and strategic prowess. Later, crossing the Sea of Japan, Go enthralled the Shogunate, which brought it into the Japanese Imperial Court and made it a national cult." Then AlphaGo, from Google's DeepMind, appeared on the scene in 2016: As the Chinese American titan Kai-Fu Lee explains in his bestseller AI Super-powers,8 the riveting encounter between man and machine across the Go board had a powerful effect on Asian youth. Though mostly unnoticed in the United States, AlphaGo's 2016 defeat of Lee Sedol was avidly watched by 280 million Chinese, and Sedol's loss was a shattering experience. The Chinese saw DeepMind as an alien system defeating an Asian man in the epitome of an Asian game.

China launched its Chang'e 5 mission to the moon early Tuesday morning local time from the country's launch site on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The country is seeking to bring soil and rock samples from the lunar surface back to Earth for the first time in its history, for scientific study. What's going to happen: Chang'e 5 should make it to the moon on November 27. The entire mission consists of four parts: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent stage, and a return capsule. The spacecraft are not equipped with any heating units to help the onboard electronics withstand the super-cold temperatures of the lunar night. That means the mission must collect its sample and start heading back to Earth within 14 days (the length of the lunar day).

China launched its Chang'e 5 spacecraft on 23 November, in the first mission designed to bring moon rocks back to Earth in more than four decades. The uncrewed Chang'e 5 probe will attempt to collect at least 2 kilograms of lunar dust and debris from the northern region of the Oceanus Procellarum, a previously unvisited area on the near side of the moon. If successful, the Chang'e 5 return mission will make China only the third country, after the US and the Soviet Union, to have retrieved samples from the moon. The last sample return mission was carried out in 1976 by the Soviet Union's Luna 24 robotic probe, which brought back around 170 grams to Earth. The Chang'e 5 launch happened early on Tuesday morning, Beijing time, from a Long March 5 rocket at a site in Wenchang on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.

Beijing – China livestreamed footage of its new manned submersible parked at the bottom of the Mariana Trench on Friday, part of a historic mission into the deepest underwater valley on the planet. The "Fendouzhe," or "Striver," descended more than 10,000 meters (about 33,000 feet) into the submarine trench in the western Pacific Ocean with three researchers on board, state broadcaster CCTV said. Only a handful of people have ever visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped depression in the Earth's crust that is deeper than Mount Everest is high and more than 2,550 km (1,600 miles) long. The first explorers visited the trench in 1960 on a brief expedition, after which there had been no missions until Hollywood director James Cameron made the first solo trip to the bottom in 2012. Cameron described a "desolate" and "alien" environment.

The optimal charging infrastructure planning problem over a large geospatial area is challenging due to the increasing network sizes of the transportation system and the electric grid. The coupling between the electric vehicle travel behaviors and charging events is therefore complex. This paper focuses on the demonstration of a scalable computational framework for the electric vehicle charging infrastructure planning over the tightly integrated transportation and electric grid networks. On the transportation side, a charging profile generation strategy is proposed leveraging the EV energy consumption model, trip routing, and charger selection methods. On the grid side, a genetic algorithm is utilized within the optimal power flow program to solve the optimal charger placement problem with integer variables by adaptively evaluating candidate solutions in the current iteration and generating new solutions for the next iterations.

The Chinese military is aiming to utilize cutting-edge technologies like private sector-developed artificial intelligence to enhance its offensive capability in domains such as cyberspace and outer space, a Japanese Defense Ministry think tank warned Friday. Beijing aspires to match the United States' overall military capacity by transforming its People's Liberation Army into a world-class fighting force with the help of advanced technologies, the National Institute for Defense Studies said in its annual report on China's security strategy. The report said that until the Chinese catch up with the American military, "the PLA will build up its interference and strike capabilities to prevent the United States' military use of both the cyber and space domains." The China Security Report 2021 was released as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has been intensifying, as has competition for technological hegemony. The United States has restricted exports of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese telecom giant that is aiming to expand its dominance of next-generation 5G technology.

Eighteen months ago, Uber's self-driving car unit, Uber Advanced Technologies Group, was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank's Vision Fund. Now, it's up for sale and a competing autonomous vehicle technology startup is in talks with Uber to buy it, according to three sources familiar with the deal. Aurora Innovation, the startup founded by three veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry who led programs at Google, Tesla and Uber, is in negotiations to buy Uber ATG. Terms of the deal are still unknown, but sources say the two companies have been in talks since October and it is far along in the process. An Uber spokesperson declined to comment, citing that the company's general policy is not to comment on these sorts of inquiries.

The Chinese military is aiming to utilize cutting-edge technologies like private sector-developed artificial intelligence to enhance its offensive capability in domains such as cyberspace and outer space, a Japanese Defense Ministry think tank warned Friday. Beijing aspires to match the United States' overall military capacity by transforming its People's Liberation Army into a world-class fighting force with the help of advanced technologies, the National Institute for Defense Studies said in its annual report on China's security strategy. The report said that until the Chinese catch up with the American military, "the PLA will build up its interference and strike capabilities to prevent the United States' military use of both the cyber and space domains." The China Security Report 2021 was released as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has been intensifying, as has competition for technological hegemony. The United States has restricted exports of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese telecom giant that is aiming to expand its dominance of next-generation 5G technology.