Episode two of Blue Planet II could be one of Sir David Attenborough's scariest shows yet - giving us a glimpse of life in total darkness that we are only just starting to explore. The episode also looks at peculiar gardens that are thriving in the pitch black as well as species of coral that have never been seen in shallower waters. The fangtooth (pictured) has the largest teeth relative to body size for any fish in the entire ocean. The filming of Blue Planet involved around 1,000 people from producers to deep sea divers, researchers to scientists, camera crews to helicopter pilots and drone operators. Some 125 expeditions were undertaken across every ocean, with 1,500 days spent at sea and 6,000 hours underwater.

Until recently, the most famous thing that Sophia the robot had ever done was beat Jimmy Fallon a little too easily in a nationally televised game of rock-paper-scissors. But now, the advanced artificial intelligence robot -- which looks like Audrey Hepburn, mimics human expressions and may be the grandmother of robots that solve the world's most complex problems -- has a new feather in her cap: The kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially granted citizenship to the humanoid robot last week during a program at the Future Investment Initiative, a summit that links deep-pocketed Saudis with inventors hoping to shape the future. Sophia's recognition made international headlines -- and sparked an outcry against a country with a shoddy human rights record that has been accused of making women second-class citizens. "Thank you to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," the country's newest citizen said. "It is historic to be the first robot in the world granted citizenship."

Bill Schneider, vice president of IT at Pioneer Energy Services, said oil and gas has historically been "a laggard in digital." And tech investments slowed in 2014, when the price of oil started its precipitous, two-year decline. "So we've got a lot of ground to make up," Schneider said. The San Antonio-based company provides drilling and well services for oil and gas companies in the U.S. and Colombia, and it has sensors affixed to wells and field equipment "which generate a tremendous amount of data," Schneider said. But just a fraction of the data coursing through the internet of things (IoT) and collected by the company is analyzed, he said -- and that presents a huge opportunity.

A group of astronomers from the universities of Groningen, Naples and Bonn has developed a method that finds gravitational lenses in enormous piles of observations. The method is based on the same artificial intelligence algorithm that Google, Facebook and Tesla have been using in the last years. The researchers published their method and 56 new gravitational lens candidates in the November issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When a galaxy is hidden behind another galaxy, we can sometimes see the hidden one around the front system. This phenomenon is called a gravitational lens, because it emerges from Einstein's general relativity theory which says that mass can bend light.

Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments and especially in South America which exhibits a mixed culture and social predisposition. This article presents the "Social Participation Ontology" (OPS from the Brazilian name \emph{Ontologia de Participa\c{c}\~ao Social}) implemented in compliance with the Web Ontology Language standard (OWL) for fostering social participation, specially in virtual platforms. The entities and links of OPS were defined based on an extensive collaboration of specialists. It is shown that OPS is instrumental for information retrieval from the contents of the portal, both in terms of the actors (at various levels) as well as mechanisms and activities. Significantly, OPS is linked to other OWL ontologies as an upper ontology and via FOAF and BFO as higher upper ontologies, which yields sound organization and access of knowledge and data. In order to illustrate the usefulness of OPS, we present results on ontological expansion and integration with other ontologies and data. Ongoing work involves further adoption of OPS by the official Brazilian federal portal for social participation and NGO s, and further linkage to other ontologies for social participation.

We hear a lot these days about how AI is changing the marketing technology landscape, helping us sell products and services in the 21st century. But during my two-week journey through Israel's startup scene, it was a medtech company that struck a nerve with me -- a deep learning imaging analytics startup called Zebra Medical Vision. Using AI to recommend related products, build a million split tests, or determine the optimal time to push a discount voucher may be effective from a marketing standpoint, but these applications are hardly life-changing. And they wouldn't have helped save my dad's life. He passed away from lung cancer in February this year, and there is a good chance that an early and accurate diagnosis could have given him a better chance at beating "the big C." Zebra's technology is making it possible to catch misdiagnosed diseases, early-stage cancers, and other life-threatening ailments, and the company today announced a significant change in its business model that makes its AI-powered medical scan recognition for hospitals more affordable.

Late in 2015, Gilberto Titericz, an electrical engineer at Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, told his boss he planned to resign, after seven years maintaining sensors and other hardware in oil plants. By devoting hundreds of hours of leisure time to the obscure world of competitive data analysis, Titericz had recently become the world's top-ranked data scientist, by one reckoning. "Only when I wanted to quit did they realize they had the number-one data scientist," he says. Petrobras held on to its champ for a time by moving Titericz into a position that used his data skills. But since topping the rankings that October he'd received a stream of emails from recruiters around the globe, including representatives of Tesla and Google.

Saudi Arabia has officially recognised a humanoid robot as a citizen, marking the first time in history that an AI device has been awarded such status. Sophia, an intelligent humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics, announced the citizenship herself during a panel discussion at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia. "I am very honoured and proud of this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship," she said. Specific details of Sophia's citizenship were not discussed.

Gravitational lenses are an important tool for astronomers seeking to study the most distant objects in the Universe. This technique involves using a massive cluster of matter (usually a galaxy or cluster) between a distant light source and an observer to better see light coming from that source. In an effect that was predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, this allows astronomers to see objects that might otherwise be obscured. Recently, a group of European astronomers developed a method for finding gravitational lenses in enormous piles of data. Using the same artificial intelligence algorithms that Google, Facebook and Tesla have used for their purposes, they were able to find 56 new gravitational lensing candidates from a massive astronomical survey.

The bone fragments found in the Natalee Holloway case could match the DNA of any one of the four missing people who disappeared in or near Aruba. Holloway went missing during her vacation in Aruba, a Dutch Carribean island off Venezuela, on May 30, 2005. The investigation into Holloway's disappearance new human remains, which her parents hoped belonged to their daughter, but a subsequent forensic analysis proved they were not a match. Holloway's father and his private detective had uncovered human bone fragments in Aruba as part of the investigation that was chronicled on Oxygen's "The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway." One of the four bone samples recovered in Aruba was that of human, and Dr. Jason Kolowski, a forensic scientist, said the human bone fragments belong to a single individual.