San Diego Brayan Valle was looking to buy some marijuana. When he reached out to a business associate of his uncle's, a drug connection, Valle became involved in a much more serious -- and novel -- offense. Rather than sell him the marijuana, the associate asked for Valle's help to smuggle drugs over the U.S.-Mexico border by drone. The case signals the first drone drug-smuggling seizure along the Southwest border. On Thursday, Valle, now 21, was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in operating the drone remote control and loading up 30 pounds of heroin dropped into a Calexico-area field on April 28.

Google became one of the most powerful companies on the planet by addressing a once-in-a-generation problem: Make it easy for people to search for stuff online. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is hard at work tinkering with a sweep of projects, from Wi-Fi-connected thermostats to nanoparticles for detecting cancer. Sales from those projects, which Alphabet calls "Other Bets," brought in 166 million last quarter, up from 80 million a year earlier. But losses from those experiments widened to 802 million last quarter from 633 million this time last year. Normally that wouldn't matter much, but pressure is sure to mount after the company's disappointing earnings report on Thursday.

Used to be you knew which city you were in from the food, the sports team, the historic sites, even the local brew. Now a team of microbiologists discovered they can tell cities apart by their unique bacterial fingerprints. The surprising finding was made after an intense study led by John Chase of Northern Arizona University's Department of Biological Sciences and Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics. He and his colleagues spent a year swabbing for samples at nine offices in San Diego, Flagstaff, and Toronto. They wanted to find out what kind of impact factors like geography, location in a room, seasons, and human interaction have on the microbial communities we spread around, called microbiomes.

Taking a vehicle to the race track to improve it has been a thing for almost as long as we've had cars. Henry Ford built his brand's name on his early racing exploits, and so have countless others. So it's natural that some of the people interested in self-driving cars have been thinking about how the track can benefit this new technology. Joshua Schachter is one such person, and he's organizing the first autonomous track day, to be held on May 28th-29th at Thunderhill Raceway in Willow, California. Self-driving cars and racing are two of my favorite things, so I spoke to Schachter to find out more.

Undergraduate Winners for their invention SignAloud, gloves that translate sign language into text and speech. Researchers have floated possibilities in this space that could end up transforming health care, like using Google Glass to give doctors more treatment information in real time. And health care wearables promise to be a billion-dollar industry. Just this month, IBM announced the latest in a string of health and tech partnerships, a project with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to us wearable sensors to help study and treat patients with Parkinson's disease. But last week, two new wearable technologies gained a spotlight when their creators were awarded the Lemelson-MIT student prize, a yearly cash award to a handful of collegiate inventors.

Summary: In which we attempt to answer the question, how does someone in school or recently out enter the exciting world of data science. There is no question that comes up more frequently than'how do I become a data scientist'. I've actually written several articles on this topic (and will reference them liberally in this post) but they lacked the global perspective that potential new entrants to data science want. I'm going to try to resolve here. I thought about changing the title to "Doing Data Science" instead of becoming a Data Scientist to focus on the activity and not just the job title.

This is a good question, and one that seems to get raised time and time again. Myself and a colleague (Sven Crone from Lancaster University in the UK) published a paper on this issue last year in the International Journal of Forecasting. A summary of our findings can also be found in the book "Credit Scoring, Response Modeling and Insurance Rating. There are also some very good papers by G. Weiss from 2004/5 which are highly cited and referenced in our paper/book. What we found was that for some methods of model construction sample imbalance was not an issue at all – not even a tiny amount.

A team of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have created prototypes of "electronic synapses" based on ultra-thin films of hafnium oxide (HfO2). These prototypes could potentially be used in fundamentally new computing systems. The paper has been published in the journal Nanoscale Research Letters. The group of researchers from MIPT have made HfO2-based memristors measuring just 40x40 nm2. The nanostructures they built exhibit properties similar to biological synapses.

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The most realistic risks about the dangers of artificial intelligence are basic mistakes, breakdowns and cyber attacks, an expert in the field says – more so than machines that become super powerful, run amok and try to destroy the human race. Thomas Dietterich, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a distinguished professor of computer science at Oregon State University, said that the recent contribution of 10 million by Elon Musk to the Future of Life Institute will help support some important and needed efforts to ensure AI safety. But the real risks may not be as dramatic as some people visualize, he said. "For a long time the risks of artificial intelligence have mostly been discussed in a few small, academic circles, and now they are getting some long-overdue attention," Dietterich said. "That attention, and funding to support it, is a very important step."