Autonomous-driving startup Drive.ai has released its 2017 "autonomous vehicle disengagement report." These reports are mandatory for companies testing self-driving cars in California, listing important information like miles driven and the number of incidents that occurred while covering those miles. According to its report, Drive.ai The company's self-driving cars covered 6,572 miles in autonomous mode last year, according to the report, but they also disengaged from autonomous mode 151 times, requiring a human driver to take over. But Drive.ai also claims that its seven autonomous cars weren't involved in any crashes and that the number of miles driven between disengagements was increased significantly, from around three miles in 2016 to around 100 miles in November 2017. Drive.ai received its permit to test self-driving cars on California roads in April 2016.

Consider, for a moment, some of the most pernicious challenges facing humanity today: the increasing prevalence of natural disasters; the systemic overfishing of the world's oceans; the clear-cutting of primeval forests; the maddening persistence of poverty; and above all, the accelerating effects of global climate change. Yet as a group, they share some common characteristics. Each problem is messy, with lots of moving parts. Each is riddled with perverse incentives, which can lead local actors to behave in a way that is not in the common interest. Each is opaque, with dynamics that are only partially understood, even by experts; each can, as a result, often be made worse by seemingly rational and well-intentioned interventions.

Yes, although the real work is happening not on the slopes of Davos, but on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The location, in Presidio National Park, illustrates how the Forum and key member companies have shifted their focus in recent years to the promise and perils of emerging technologies. After all, San Francisco has become the global capital of a tech industry with companies that are as influential as countries. "The tech companies were having an increasing impact on pretty much every foreign policy issue that we were dealing with," says Zvika Krieger, who served as the U.S. State Department's envoy to Silicon Valley in the Obama administration's final year. In early 2017, the WEF recruited Krieger and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Murat Sönmez to establish its first major office outside Switzerland, bearing the ambitious name World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The IEEE publishes an annual list of the Top 10 Technology Trends for each upcoming year. Making the list for 2018 are multiple topics surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning. Deep learning comes in as the IEEE hottest trend for 2018. Neural networks extract features through a concept of layers. By combining the output from these multiple layers, deeper layers are able to construct more advanced insight from data.

While VGGs, being relatively shallow and modular and having no residual connections or other special tricks to smuggle raw information up the layers, are forced to create more of a clearcut hierarchical pyramid of abstractions.

More melted fuel has been found at the bottom of the Fukushima power planet, seven years after Japan's worst nuclear disaster. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of Japan's crippled nuclear plant, says a long telescopic probe has successfully captured images of the fuel inside the plant's Unit 2 primary containment vessel. The images showed that at least part of the fuel breached the core, falling to the vessel's floor. TEPCO says that that the status inside the primary containment vessel is still stable, and that there are no changes in radiation levels at the site boundaries of Fukushima Daiichi's Nuclear Power Plant. A massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 caused three reactors at the Fukushima plant to melt.

Amazon's hunt for a second headquarters, after several months of publicity stunts and dangled perks from cities and regions vying to lure the e-commerce giant, has been narrowed to 20 options from 238 bids. The company, which is based in Seattle, plans to invest $5 billion in development and create up to 50,000 jobs wherever it builds its newest hub. With the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for bids to host the Olympics, governors, mayors, business leaders and others have pulled together proposals promoting the potential of their cities and regions, sometimes going to outlandish lengths. These are some of the places that caught Amazon's attention. Schools: The caliber of local schools is impressive, including Harvard University, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University.

Early Saturday morning the Dragon cargo spacecraft that's been attached to the International Space Station since Dec. 17 is expected to be released and sent back to Earth. The plan was to have the flight controllers on the ISS use the robotic arm of the station to move the Dragon into place on Friday so that come Saturday morning, a ground-controlled crew could release the craft at the perfect time to send it back to Earth, NASA said in a release. Coverage of the release will start at 4:30 a.m. EST Saturday and the craft is scheduled for a 5 a.m. Less than four hours later, at 10:26 a.m. EST, the craft, full of experiments, is expected to splash into the Pacific Ocean. There "recovery forces" are expected to pull the Dragon from the water and taken it by ship to Long Beach, California.

The biggest underwater eruption of the last century took place 600 miles (1,000km) off the coast of New Zealand, scientists have found. The discovery was made after an airline passenger saw a strange substance spreading across the Pacific Ocean in 2012. At the time, scientists identified the material as pumice, a volcanic substance which floats. However, it has taken six years for researchers to understand the scale of the eruption with the help of remotely-operated deep search robots. The findings have been described as a'scientific goldmine' and could increase our understanding of how magma rises from the earth's crust to the surface More than 80 per cent of the volcanoes on Earth are located on the sea-floor.

The mystery surrounding the fate of a secret military satellite deepened today when the Pentagon refused to answer even simple questions about whether the mission to launch it had gone awry. On Sunday, private space firm SpaceX blasted a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida carrying the secret government satellite, known as Zuma. US media this week reported that the billion-dollar payload did not make it into orbit and was presumed to have been lost. SpaceX said Tuesday that the rocket worked fine, but its statement left open the possibility that something could have gone wrong after the launch. A top secret billion-dollar spy satellite plummeted into the Indian Ocean after a botched SpaceX mission over the weekend, but Elon Musk's company has insisted they are not to blame.