To the editor: News about the environment has been so sad lately. On the front page of Friday's Los Angeles Times, you had a story about park rangers being killed by elephant poachers in Congo, and on the Opinion page you had an article about Congress opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. We have already lost a large portion of our natural resources, but it seems that humans will not be satisfied until all of them are gone. This is not just an American problem, it is a worldwide problem. Only a small percentage of the global population is working on conservation, and we are losing.

Given the rate at which artificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing, it's proving difficult to place bets on just how far the technology will be able to go. Not just here on Earth, but beyond, as researchers harness the power of AI in space exploration to take us to the outskirts of the universe. According to Steve Chien, Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not only is AI becoming an integral part of advancing space exploration, it has become clear that the search for extraterrestrial life could be the "ultimate test" for AI in space exploration. Such a search has long been believed to require the kind of creative and intuitive decision making that, for now at least, seems uniquely human. Chien stated in an interview with Scientific American that "Unsupervised learning is extremely important to analyzing the unknown. A big part of what humans are able to do is interpret data that are unfamiliar."

We asked each of our staff to suggest the best story they had written or edited in 2017--the most important, most interesting, or best executed. I found the scientists quietly thinking about how to make better--or just different--kinds of humans to colonize outer space. From our dreams of space travel, a surprisingly strong ethical argument emerges in favor of messing with an individual's genetic code. Kids like my four-year-old niece Hannah are growing up from infancy with digital assistants, and it's time to start talking about what effect it will have on them. My story attempted to start a serious conversation on an under-explored topic despite the scarcity of academic research.

WASHINGTON – When Celeste Kidd was a graduate student of neuroscience at the University of Rochester she says a professor supervising her made her life unbearable by stalking her, making demeaning comments about her weight and talking about sex. Ten years on and now a professor of neuroscience at the university, Kidd is taking legal action. She has filed a federal lawsuit against the school alleging that it mishandled its sexual harassment investigation into the professor's actions and then retaliated against her and her colleagues for reporting the misconduct. "We are trying to bring transparency to a system that is corrupt," Kidd told The Associated Press. Academia -- like Hollywood, the media and Congress -- is facing its own #MeToo movement over allegations of sexual misconduct.

Federal lawmakers want to have a say in defining artificial intelligence. Researchers are now using TV shows to feed the predictive capability of an AI system. Google said in recent days it's opening an AI-focused research facility in China. And on and on the headlines keep coming, all of which is to say that interest in AI remains acute -- and its presence pervasive -- as 2017 draws to a close. And, based on a few recent developments, 2018 should be another big year of AI-related leaps forward as machines expand their influence over the minutiae of our lives.

The year 2017 is coming to a close, and as in years past, we look back with excitement at the medical technologies that have been gracing the pages of Medgadget. As usual, there are trends that have revealed themselves, with many research teams around the world working on similar technologies. There are also new devices that are unlike anything we've seen before, solving medical problems in novel and unexpected ways. Take a journey with us as we review the most innovative, full of impact, and revolutionary medical technologies of the past year! Ingestible devices, mostly in the form of cameras or other sensors that travel and assess the insides of the GI tract, have been around for a few years now.

The GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative, led by retired General John R. Allen, presented on Monday (27 November) its final report on the future of the Alliance. General John R. Allen is a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, and past Deputy Commander of US Central Command, prior to serving as Commander of the International Security Assistance Force and US Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A). Alexander Russell "Sandy" Vershbow is an American diplomat and former Deputy Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. From October 2005 to October 2008, he was the United States Ambassador to South Korea. What is GLOBSEC and what is the purpose of the report? Gen. Allen: GLOBSEC is a think tank, a public policy research institute in Slovakia, headquartered in Bratislava.

The biggest knock against sending robots to explore the solar system for signs of life has always been their inability to make intuitive, even creative decisions as effectively as humans can. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to narrow that gap soon--which is a good thing, because there are no immediate plans to send people to explore Mars's subterranean caves or search for hydrothermal vents below Europa's icy waters. For the foreseeable future those roles will likely be filled by nearly autonomous rovers and submarines that can withstand hostile conditions and conduct important science experiments, even when out of contact with Earth for weeks or even months. When Steve Chien took over NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Group in the mid-1990s, such sophisticated AI seemed more like science fiction than something destined to play a crucial role to the success of NASA's upcoming 2020 mission to Mars. Chien had a vision to make the technology an indispensable part of NASA's biggest missions.

By Luis Fierro Carrión (*) In March 2016, Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence system beat Korean master Lee Sedol in the game "Go", an ancient Chinese table game. The possible moves in this game have a level of complexity much greater than those of chess. Google developed an algorithm for AlphaGo to learn recursively each time it played, through a deep neural network. AlphaGo learned to discover new strategies by itself, by playing thousands of games within its neural networks, and adjusting the connections through a process of trial and error known as "learning by reinforcement". Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been conquering more and more complex games: tic-tac-toe in 1952, checkers in 1994, chess in 1997, "Jeopardy" (a game of questions on different subjects) in 2011; and in 2014, Google's algorithms learned how to play 49 Atari video games simply by studying the inputs in the screen pixels and the scores obtained.

The newest presidential addition to Disney's Hall of Presidents at the Magic Kingdom Park stirred up news last week when the first photos of the robot, meant to look like President Donald Trump, were revealed. Now the animatronic Trump is in the spotlight again. A visitor to the park posted a video of themselves screaming at Trump's lookalike to Twitter on Wednesday evening. The more than two-minute long video shows the presentation of the presidents in the exhibit. The names of America's presents are listed, and then the voiceover says: "And now we come to the present, once again we place our trust in the idea of a president as we have from the beginning."