"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

Computers and other machines have and will continue to change the way people do business and how we live. Many researchers use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to describe the thinking and intelligent behavior demonstrated by machines. While AI can be helpful to human beings, scientists warn, it can also be a threat. We live with artificial intelligence all around us. A few examples are iPhone's personal assistant Siri, searches on the Internet, and autopilot programs on airplanes.

A market basket analysis or recommendation engine [1] is what is behind all these recommendations we get when we go shopping online or whenever we receive targeted advertising. The underlying engine collects information about people's habits and knows that if people buy pasta and wine, they are usually also interested in pasta sauces. So, the next time you go to the supermarket and buy pasta and wine, be ready to get a recommendation for some pasta sauce! A typical analysis goal when applying market basket analysis it to produce a set of association rules in the following form: IF {pasta, wine, garlic} THEN pasta-sauce The first part of the rule is called "antecedent", the second part is called "consequent". A few measures, such as support, confidence, and lift, define how reliable each rule is.

In the past few weeks, you may have noticed a mysterious message popping up on your iPhone after hours of non-use. A seemingly new prompt requires users to enter a passcode to access their phone, even though they have Touch ID enabled – but only if it hasn't been unlocked using its passcode in six days, and the Touch ID hasn't been used within the last eight hours. Though Apple has said the feature was added with the release of iOS 9, users have just now begun to see it, causing many to speculate about its connection to the firm's recent tensions with the FBI. A seemingly new prompt requires users to enter a passcode to access their phone, even though they have Touch ID enabled – but only if it hasn't been unlocked using its passcode in six days, and the Touch ID hasn't been used within the last eight hours According to the iOS Security Guide published earlier this month, there are a number of situations in which you may have to use your passcode to unlock your iPhone or iPad even if Touch ID is enabled. According to Macworld, the message reads'The passcode has not been used to unlock the device in the last six days and Touch ID has not unlocked the device in the last eight hours.'

Before we get on to the business of the review, I should confess that I have never been able to get past a dozen or so screens of the video game "Food Fight." I have never been able to chuck more than a pie or two at the murderous chefs. I have never figured out why a handful of peas will take down the white-toqued aggressors while a banana seems to whirl right past their heads. I have never reached the moment, beloved of the game's aficionados, where I manage to whiz slice after slice of watermelon at my adversaries, which seems to be the best way to rack up enough points to register on the leader board. I feed token after token into the machine.

Automation has been responsible for improvements in manufacturing productivity for decades. Advanced robotics will accelerate this trend. Machines, after all, can perform many manufacturing tasks more efficiently, effectively and consistently than humans, leading to increased output, better quality and less waste. And machines don't require health insurance, coffee breaks, maternity leave or sleep. The industrial world realizes this and robot sales have been surging, increasing 29 percent in 2014 alone, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

Following a similar business tactic that drug dealers have employed for ages, developer Blizzard is giving folks who check out the upcoming Warcraft movie a free, full, copy of World of Warcraft. That's assuming you see the movie at certain Regal Cinemas (which is running a promo to send folks to BlizzCon, as well), United Artists Theaters or Edwards Theaters here in the United States. The promo is supported abroad too, with Australia, Brazil, Europe, Southeast Asia and New Zealand all getting in on the action.

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.

The militant extremist group has suffered recent military setbacks and lost territory in both Iraq and Syria, says Brett McGurk, presidential adviser for the anti-ISIS coalition. Unlike most leaders in his party, the presumptive Republican nominee opposes any changes to Social Security and says he is open to the idea of a higher minimum wage. Michel Temer, who leads the South American country in the wake of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, must deal with an ongoing economic recession, the Zika virus, a distrustful populace and the upcoming Rio Summer Olympics. Self-driving cars, which could be motoring on more American streets within a decade, may prove so convenient that their use might soar and cause more traffic jams. An "incredibly lifelike" but fake bomb forced police to evacuate Old Trafford stadium on the final day of the English Premier League soccer season.