Here come the cyborg beetles. Electronic-filled backpacks have been used to create controllable flying bio-robots. Male M. torquata beetles had electrodes implanted into four of their flight muscles. Small electric pulses were then administered to steer them left or right. Their acceleration could be increased by upping the frequency of the pulses.

These stark images showing the heart of the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone reveal the devastation inside its destroyed reactor. The scenes were captured by a camera attached to a 50ft rod and inserted into reactor 2 at the doomed Japanese power plant, on the country's north east coast. Footage shows melted nuclear fuel attached to the pillars, walls and ceiling, as well as puddles of coolant, and debris piled up 16 to 27ins thick on the ground. Analysis of the images by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning said the spread of debris was suggestive of several holes in the reactor floor. It is seven years since the disaster was unleashed by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. But due to the deadly dose of radiation inside Fukushima, humans have to rely on robots to explore it – and even these have been left malfunctioning and broken.

A solar-powered spy drone that can fly for a year without maintenance or fuel could one day carry out missions for the British military. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) uses the sun to power its engines during the day as well as recharge its batteries for overnight operation. Known as Phasa-35, the aircraft could one day be used for surveillance and provide vital communications to remote areas at altitudes of up to 70,000ft (21,000m). Work is already underway to prepare the first drone for flight tests in 2019, according to British defence giant BAE Systems, which is developing the aircraft. A solar-powered spy drone (artist's impression) that can fly for a year without maintenance or fuel could one day carry out missions for the British military Engineers from BAE and Farnborough-based firm Prismatic announced Thursday they would collaborate on the development of the UAV.

Drones and crawlers may be a stepping stone. Norwegian oil producer Statoil is eying an unmanned, remotely operated production concept. Noble Drilling and General Electric Co this year launched a partnership to produce a fully digitized drilling vessel, work the companies said paves the way for an autonomous drilling fleet.

Adobe outlined a series of new artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and features from its labs that it plans to roll into the company's analytics tools. But the more interesting item may be how Adobe thinks about developing new AI-driven technologies and collaborates across functions. Adobe has more than 200 PhDs in machine learning, economics, physics and computer science in its analytics unit. This brain power sits within Adobe's R&D unit as well as within various departments and units. "We provide a Hubble telescope into data to see much deeper and further," said John Bates, group product manager for Adobe Analytics.

We address the problem of maintaining high voltage power transmission networks in security at all time. This requires that power flowing through all lines remain below a certain nominal thermal limit above which lines might melt, break or cause other damages. Current practices include enforcing the deterministic "N-1" reliability criterion, namely anticipating exceeding of thermal limit for any eventual single line disconnection (whatever its cause may be) by running a slow, but accurate, physical grid simulator. New conceptual frameworks are calling for a probabilistic risk based security criterion and are in need of new methods to assess the risk. To tackle this difficult assessment, we address in this paper the problem of rapidly ranking higher order contingencies including all pairs of line disconnections, to better prioritize simulations. We present a novel method based on neural networks, which ranks "N-1" and "N-2" contingencies in decreasing order of presumed severity. We demonstrate on a classical benchmark problem that the residual risk of contingencies decreases dramatically compared to considering solely all "N-1" cases, at no additional computational cost. We evaluate that our method scales up to power grids of the size of the French high voltage power grid (over 1000 power lines).

We address the problem of maintaining high voltage power transmission networks in security at all time, namely anticipating exceeding of thermal limit for eventual single line disconnection (whatever its cause may be) by running slow, but accurate, physical grid simulators. New conceptual frameworks are calling for a probabilistic risk-based security criterion. However, these approaches suffer from high requirements in terms of tractability. Here, we propose a new method to assess the risk. This method uses both machine learning techniques (artificial neural networks) and more standard simulators based on physical laws. More specifically we train neural networks to estimate the overall dangerousness of a grid state. A classical benchmark problem (manpower 118 buses test case) is used to show the strengths of the proposed method.

This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Lee Shavel. Mr. Shavel, please go ahead. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter of 2018 financial results. With me on the call this morning are Scott Stephenson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Anquillare, Chief Operating Officer. Following comments by Scott, Mark and myself, highlighting some key points about our financial performance, we will open the call for your questions. The earnings release referenced on this call as well as the associated 10-Q can be found in the Investors section of our website, verisk.com. The earnings release has also been attached to an 8-K that we have furnished to the SEC. We also filed an 8-K on April 26, 2018, with a description of our business segment recasting. A replay of this call will be available for 30 days on our website and by dial-in. Finally, as set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements about Verisk's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from what is suggested by our comments today. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our recent SEC filings. Now, I will turn the call over to Scott Stephenson. The first quarter was another example of our team achieving a high level of organic revenue growth, which remains the most important measure of our vitality as an organization. This growth was a product of our traditional multilevel growth plan including, first, the development of new customers for existing solutions, such as was seen in our claims analytics platform; secondly, the cross-selling of our existing solutions to existing customers as seen in our imagery solutions and upstream oil and gas analytics; and thirdly, new products including insurance data hosting. Over the last 90 days, I was particularly impressed by the quality of our engagement with many large leading customers resulting in real-time business wins and opportunities into the future. We continue to enjoy visits from the most senior leaders at some of our biggest customers who are looking to get closer to our pipeline of innovations. We held the largest gathering in our history for customers of our catastrophe analytics solutions and we're impressed again with the level of engagement and input from our clients.

An illegal connection might be detected from the vibrations caused by an outflow where one is not supposed to be… The idea is that [the AI tool] can be used to quickly narrow down the location of any water losses, allowing operators using geophones to pinpoint the exact site. In one case, in Votorantim, a city in São Paulo state, it would have taken the local water company two years to survey its network of pipes using two operators armed with geophones." He says it's situations like that which highlight differences between what is legal in the laws of war and what is morally right -- something that autonomous weapons might not distinguish. "That is one of the concerns that people raise about autonomous weapons is a lack of an ability to feel empathy and to engage in mercy in war. And that if we built these weapons, they would take away a powerful restraint in warfare that humans have."

Though nearly seventy percent of Earth's surface is comprised of water, only three percent is considered fresh and drinkable--and most of that striking minority is trapped in glaciers or polar ice caps. Juxtapose the dearth of natural drinking water with the disquieting realization that nearly a billion people still lack unfettered access to clean water, and the world's oceans suddenly look a lot smaller. This global quandary has led to the ambitious goal of making oceans drinkable--but doing so is going to require a ton of innovation and processing power. Let's take a look at how the next generation of supercomputers might help solve our water challenges and more. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory believe the answer lies in carbon nanotubes (and a whole lot more, but let's start here for now).