We are in the midst of a significant shift in pharmaceutical drug development, with many leading companies focusing increasingly on orphan drugs targeted at small niche markets. An orphan disease is a medical condition or disorder that affects less than 200,000 people in the US. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has classified as many as 7,000 medical conditions as orphan diseases. Although a rare disease affects only a small population, the collective number of rare diseases affects as many as 25 million people. This mammoth-sized number of people requiring niche drugs is a serious public health concern.

Understanding big data is not humanly possible without automation. Bob Palmer helps identify how we can use machine learning in national security missions. With augmented tech, analysts can identify potential bad guys from a known list of bad guys or determine which courses of action are most likely, most dangerous, or may involve cyber-attacks. Machine learning can also help predict self-radicalization or give a possible location of an adversary based on terrain and past movement.

Elon Musk has called it: you're already a cyborg. Your smartphone enhances your mind, your spectacles enhance your vision, and your pacemaker (if you have one) regulates your heartbeat. Our environment is increasingly wired, sensor-filled, and digitally connected--and so are we! This trend will only continue. All over the world biohackers, scientists, entrepreneurs and corporations are eagerly pursuing new and marketable applications for advanced technologies. Many of them are being actively designed to help humans fulfill our age-old transcendent longings--to be stronger, smarter, better-looking and more resilient, and to cultivate new abilities that seem like superpowers by the standards of the past.

President Trump is smarter than everybody else put together. When somebody who thinks such a thing also happens to be president of the United States, you know that you have come to the end of something or other. We do know we are not at the end of history, because Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding, what history teaches (and maybe the ONLY thing it teaches) is that it keeps going. On top of all the other outrageous aspects of the Trump presidency, we have the absolutely exhausting one of trying daily to disentangle the web of nonsense and distortion being continuously ejected from the Trump spinneret. This will last, alas, as long as the Trump presidency does.

MIAMI – One of the biggest Martian dust storms on record is clearing up after nearly three months, raising hope that NASA's stranded solar-powered robotic vehicle, Opportunity, will soon come back to life. The storm was first detected on May 30, and the U.S. space agency's 15-year-old rover was last heard from on June 10, when it went into "sleep" mode as dust blocked out the sun and darkness enveloped the red planet. A NASA statement issued late Thursday called the situation "critical" but added that "the rover team is cautiously optimistic, knowing that Opportunity has overcome significant challenges during its 14-plus years on Mars." If no successful contact can be made, NASA will give up active efforts in mid-October. "If we do not hear back after 45 days, the team will be forced to conclude that the sun-blocking dust and the Martian cold have conspired to cause some type of fault from which the rover will more than likely not recover," said John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This month US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) posted the latest in a series of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for its Traveler Verification Service (TVS) program. The latest PIA gives notice (although not in the form required by Federal law) that CBP and its airline and airport partners are carrying out a second expanded phase of "demonstrations" of TVS, an identity-as-a-service scheme designed to use automated recognition of images from a shared CBP/airline/airport database of facial photos for purposes including surveillance and control (for CBP) and business process automation and price personalization (for airlines and airports). CBP (1) describes TVS as a "biometric exit" program, (2) describes the current use of TVS as merely a "demonstration", (3) continues to claim that airlines and airports "have no interest in keeping or retaining" facial images any longer, or using them for any other purposes, than is required by CBP for "security", and (4) says that U.S citizens aren't required to submit to mug shots. These claims are intended to lull the public into not protesting: "This is only a test, using photos for limited purposes. The photos will be deleted once you get on the plane, and not used for nay commercial or other purpose."

We present a novel framework that enables efficient probabilistic inference in large-scale scientific models by allowing the execution of existing domain-specific simulators as probabilistic programs, resulting in highly interpretable posterior inference. Our framework is general purpose and scalable, and is based on a cross-platform probabilistic execution protocol through which an inference engine can control simulators in a language-agnostic way. We demonstrate the technique in particle physics, on a scientifically accurate simulation of the tau lepton decay, which is a key ingredient in establishing the properties of the Higgs boson. High-energy physics has a rich set of simulators based on quantum field theory and the interaction of particles in matter. We show how to use probabilistic programming to perform Bayesian inference in these existing simulator codebases directly, in particular conditioning on observable outputs from a simulated particle detector to directly produce an interpretable posterior distribution over decay pathways. Inference efficiency is achieved via inference compilation where a deep recurrent neural network is trained to parameterize proposal distributions and control the stochastic simulator in a sequential importance sampling scheme, at a fraction of the computational cost of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling.

The fact that increasingly complex automation is applied to problems that were solved entirely by humans opens the door to great opportunities but also to fallouts and shortcomings. According to consulting firm Accenture, American companies are expected to invest 35 trillion dollars in cognitive technologies before 2035, and that does not take into account other big players, such us Europe, China or Japan. Governments, such the French, are recognizing the importance of AI for the economy and the society. In Spain, the Ministry of Digital Agenda (Minetad) has created a group of experts that is working on a White Paper on AI.

The Japanese space agency will land two robots on an asteroid next month – the latest step in historic plans to explore its surface and bring samples back to Earth. The mission to the 1km-wide space rock, known as Ryugu, could provide clues not only to the asteroid's formation but to the formation of our solar system. The Japanese space agency have now selected dates for the deployment of smaller crafts from Hayabusa-2 . From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Chinese government has announced plans to intensify its crackdown on video gaming in order to counter worsening short-sightedness among minors. Regulators are directed to limit the number of new online games, restrict playing time and develop an age-restriction system in the industry, according to a statement posted on the Education Ministry website late on Thursday. The authority justified the new curbs as a way to counter worsening visual impairment among minors, after President Xi Jinping earlier this week called for greater national attention on optical health. Beijing is tightening government oversight of the country's booming video games industry But the move adds to perceptions that there is a broader campaign to rein in China's fast-growing video game sub-culture after authorities already made clear their concerns over gaming addiction and the violent content of many shoot-em-up titles. The education ministry statement, also endorsed by seven other ministries, said they will'implement regulations and controls' on the number of games that can be played online, limit new releases, explore an age-restriction system for games, and take steps to reduce playing time by minors. No specifics or timeframe were given.