I write about search A LOT--about how to nail search engine marketing (SEM), the impact mobile has on consumers' search and purchasing habits and how RankBrain and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the search game. Why do I write about this so much? That's easy: if you're a marketer and don't care about what's happening with search, it's impossible to do your job. The conversations about search so far, though, have always had one thing in common: We've been talking about text. Think for a moment about all the images and visual assets circulating the web.

What do you think of when you hear the word "technology"? Do you think of jet planes and laboratory equipment and underwater farming? Or do you think of smartphones and machine-learning algorithms? When a grave-faced announcer on CNBC says "technology stocks are down today," we all know he means Facebook and Apple, not Boeing and Pfizer. To Thiel, this signals a deeper problem in the American economy, a shrinkage in our belief of what's possible, a pessimism about what is really likely to get better. Our definition of what technology is has narrowed, and he thinks that narrowing is no accident. "Technology gets defined as'that which is changing fast,'" he says. "If the other things are not defined as'technology,' we filter them out and we don't even look at them." He founded PayPal and Palantir, was one of the earliest investors in Facebook, and now sits atop a fortune estimated in the billions. We spoke in his sleek, floor-to-ceiling-windowed apartment overlooking Manhattan -- a palace built atop the riches of the IT revolution.

As the executive chairman of Alphabet, the parent company for Google, he would be expected to be an avid user of his firm's Android mobile phones. But Eric Schmidt has an embarrassing secret - he uses an iPhone 6s, a device made by his company's rival Apple. The technology chief made the admission during an interview at a seminar in Amsterdam, admitting he carries both the iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy S7, which runs on his company's Android software. Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted to using an iPhone 6s alongside the Samsung S7 that runs his own company's Android software. He made the admission after interviewer Julia Chatterley said she had seen him before taking to the stage with two phones in his pocket.

KABUL, Afghanistan – The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that their leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and that they have appointed a successor -- a scholar known for extremist views who is unlikely to back a peace process with Kabul. The announcement came as a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying court employees in the Afghan capital, killing at least 11 people, an official said. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement sent to the media, the Taliban said their new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of Mansour's two deputies. The insurgent group said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which is believed to have taken place in Pakistan, but offered no other details.

The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that their leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and that they have appointed a successor -- a scholar known for extremist views who is unlikely to back a peace process with Kabul. The announcement came as a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying court employees in the Afghan capital, killing at least 11 people, an official said. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement sent to the media, the Taliban said their new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of Mansour's two deputies. The insurgent group said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which is believed to have taken place in Pakistan, but offered no other details.

The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that their leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and that they have appointed a successor -- a scholar known for extremist views who is unlikely to back a peace process with Kabul. The announcement came as a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying court employees in the Afghan capital, killing at least 10 people, an official said. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement sent to the media, the Taliban said their new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of Mansour's two deputies. The insurgent group said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which is believed to have taken place in Pakistan, but offered no other details.

In a first, a team of physicists is using artificial intelligence (AI) to run a complex experiment to create an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam known as a Bose-Einstein condensate -- thus replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the universe -- far colder than outer space and typically less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. They can be used for mineral exploration or navigation systems as they are extremely sensitive to external disturbances, which allows them to make very precise measurements such as tiny changes in the Earth's magnetic field or gravity. Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, along with German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, founded the basis for Bose-Einstein statistics. It describes the statistical distribution of identical particles with integer spin, now called subatomic particle or the "God particle" Boson.

The following interview is one of many included in the report. Benjamin Recht is an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department as well as the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on scalable computational tools for large-scale data analysis, statistical signal processing, and machine learning -- exploring the intersections of convex optimization, mathematical statistics, and randomized algorithms. David Beyer: You're known for thinking about computational issues in machine learning, but you've recently begun to relate it to control theory. Can you talk about some of that work?

"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.

Congratulations are in order for the folks at Google Deepmind (https://deepmind.com) who have mastered Go (https://deepmind.com/alpha-go.html). However, some of the discussion around this seems like giddy overstatement. Wired says, "machines have conquered the last games" (http://bit.ly/200O5zG) The truth is nowhere close. For Go itself, it has been well known for a decade that Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS, http://bit.ly/1YbLm4M; that is, valuation by assuming randomized playout) is unusually effective in Go.