"This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He spent four years fighting, blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold, until one day the inevitable happened: he was seriously injured, treading on a landmine while he was on morning patrol. "I stepped on it and it exploded," he recalled. "It threw me up and down again – and then I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot." His comrades carried him back to base camp, but there was hardly any medical care available. It took 25 days before he received proper treatment, during which time he developed tetanus down one side of his body.

Fans attending Formula E's Buenos Aires ePrix got a nice treat: the first'race' between self-driving cars on a professional track, courtesy of a test from Roborace. Only... it didn't quite go according to plan. Roborace's two test vehicles (known as DevBots) battled it out on the circuit at a reasonably quick 115MPH, but one of the cars crashed after it took a turn too aggressively. The racing league was quick to tout the safety advantages of crashing autonomous cars ("no drivers were harmed"), but it's clear that the tech is still rough around the edges. Not that Roborace is likely to dispute the need for improvement -- that's what a test like this is for.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Help? There are over 5 million search results when you Google, "Will artificial intelligence replace humans?". The doomsday scenario and visceral fear created by the potential "rise of the machines" has people like Elon Musk describing artificial intelligence as "summoning the demon," and the biggest threat facing the world. Advances in technology can absolutely simplify certain processes, buying behaviors and reduce operational costs. Just look at what Amazon has done to the retail sector, and not the least of which at where it's taking consumer goods purchasing, with its newly released Amazon Go.

Brain Tunnelgenix Technologies Corp (BTT Corp) is a med-tech company with offices in the US and Brazil. They have a biological discovery patent on the Brain Thermal Tunnel and are developing several solutions around this to help improve your health through continuous monitoring of your brain temperature. BTT treats brain temperature like a multichannel signal and uses this to perform analysis and pattern recognition to further insights into customers' health on a personalized basis. Join Jerry Nixon as he welcomes Robert Ortega, CTO of BTT Corp, and the team from Microsoft – David Crook and Yun Chou - as they discuss how by working together they developed an Azure IoT solution to help with brain thermal tunnel pattern recognition. If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Astro Teller knows how to draw attention. He was wearing his rollerblades on Thursday when he glided into a roomful of reporters to announce that Project Loon--Alphabet's wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world's farthest-flung places via giant balloons--is even closer to reality than the company previously thought. It was a made-for-the-press moment, but Teller buried the lede. It's cool that these balloons may soon start broadcasting internet signals from the stratosphere. But the bigger deal here is that machine learning is moving beyond its digital origins into the real world.

This week in the Substance ÉTS science review, we highlight articles on two topics that are top concerns for many people: Artificial Intelligence and the environment. Each quarter, The Economist publishes a fairly detailed review of a particular aspect of technology. In the first quarter of 2017, The Economist published seven articles describing the progress and limitations of language technology with, in addition, a glimpse of the future in this field. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in the US, are trying to figure out how MIT students solve a planning problem. They found that the strategies used by the majority of students could be described using a language called "linear temporal logic".

The future of fashion, according to Epson, is all about customization – from the prints and colors we choose to wear, to indeed the size and shape that best suits us. Tie together digital printing, a bit of artificial intelligence and some robotics on the end, and it's a vision that's not too far off, which is precisely what the technology company is hoping to help make possible on all accounts. Its senior team, including global president Minoru Usui, was in New York last week to host its third annual "Digital Couture" event. This saw 13 design teams from across North and Latin America leveraging Epson's dye-sublimation and direct-to-fabric printing technology to create small collections that were presented during an evening event held ahead of New York Fashion Week. The occasion also served to officially introduce the fact Epson acquired Italian textile printer manufacturer Robustelli in 2016.

In the hope of bringing internet access to even the most remote corners of the globe, Google parent Alphabet's'Loon' project has taken a big step closer. Alphabet said artificial intelligence-infused navigation software has significantly sped up plans, helping to smartly guide high-altitude balloons to improve coverage. While the firm has not said when it expects the balloons to be up and running, Astro Teller, head of the team at Alphabet unit X said: 'We are looking to move quickly, but to move thoughtfully.' Alphabet said artificial intelligence-infused navigation software has significantly sped up plans, helping to smartly guide high-altitude balloons to improve coverage. Teller said: 'Our timelines are starting to move up on how we can do more for the world sooner.'

Astro Teller knows how to draw attention. He was wearing his rollerblades on Thursday when he glided into a roomful of reporters to announce that Project Loon--Alphabet's wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world's farthest-flung places via giant balloons--is even closer to reality than the company previously thought. It was a made-for-the-press moment, but Teller buried the lede. It's cool that these balloons may soon start broadcasting internet signals from the stratosphere. But the bigger deal here is that machine learning is moving beyond its digital origins into the real world.