Remember back when you could fly drones without having to pay the government money first, and when the only thing you had to worry about was a midair takedown by an anti-drone hit squad made up of highly-trained Dutch eagles? We're sad to have to report that we probably won't be seeing compelling videos of eagles handling rogue drones anymore, and also that the United States government has flexed its muscles and mandatory drone registration is now back on. You probably remember how the FAA finalized its mandatory drone registration rules just in time for the holiday season in 2015. Any drone that weighed more than 0.55 pounds was required to be registered before being flown outdoors, a process that involved providing your complete name, physical address, mailing address, email address, and a credit card that was charged a one-time fee of US $5. In exchange, you got a unique registration number that had to be visible on all of your drones.

Nasa researchers have found the first ever solar system that's filled with eight planets like ours, 2,500 lightyears away. But it might be the way it was discovered that's really astounding. It wasn't found by an astronomer, but by an artificially intelligent computer program built by Google. The research has led to hopes that AI can be used across astronomy to identify new planets and other discoveries with vastly increased speed. It's likely to find many more exoplanets from now on, say scientists, filling up solar systems and the universe with previously hidden worlds.

The Kepler Space Telescope is pretty good at finding exoplanets. Researchers have already used the NASA spacecraft to discover more than 3,000 different exoplanets--including several this year that could be home to life (or even us). Leave it to Google to make Kepler even better. Chris Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google, teamed up with Andrew Vanderburg, a NASA astrophysicist currently at the University of Texas at Austin, to teach a computer how to find signs of exoplanet existence that researchers using Kepler previously missed. When scientists hunt for an exoplanet, they look for dips in the brightness of far-away points in space that otherwise look like stars.

NASA has discovered an eighth planet around a distant star, which means we're no longer the largest solar system we know of. The discovery was made thanks to some artificial intelligence help from Google, which found the planet by scouring previously overlooked "weak" signals in data captured by the Kepler Space Telescope. The newly found planet is located in the solar system around Kepler-90, a star about 2,500 light-years away from Earth that was previously discovered in 2014. The Kepler Space Telescope has been searching the galactic sky for exoplanets, or planets outside our own Solar System, since it launched in 2009. In order to sift through all the data that it's captured since that launch, scientists usually look at the strongest signals first.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone X, it catapulted artificial intelligence and machine learning into the limelight. Facial recognition became a mainstream reality for those who can afford it. A few months later, Vietnamese cyber security firm Bkav claimed it was able to bypass the iPhone X's Face ID using a relatively inexpensive $150 mask. The claim is still up in the air and while it has not been accepted to its full extent, no one was actually able to refute the claim based on scientific facts. For anyone dealing in AI and security, it emphasized what many of us have held true for a while.

But one telehealth company – Now Healthcare Group – believes it can apply AI to its existing apps to relieve some of that strain.

A California lawmaker introduced a resolution Tuesday to ban the use of autonomous weapons. According to KPIX 5, San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa is looking to press Congress and the United Nations to restrict the development of "killer robots." On Tuesday, Canepa introduced a resolution to ban, in his own words, "autonomous weapons, AKA, killer robots." If the resolution is adopted, San Mateo County would be the first in the United States to urge Congress and the United Nations to restrict weaponized robotic technology. "As policy makers, for us to catch up with technology we ourselves have to be out in front of it," Canepa said.

With eight planets whirling around its sun, our solar system has held the galactic title for having the most known planets of any star system in the Milky Way. But on Thursday NASA announced the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a distant star some 2,500 light years away from here called Kepler 90, bringing that system's total to eight planets as well. The new planet, known as Kepler-90i, is rocky and hot. The finding was made using data collected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, a planet hunter that has spotted more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets since its launch in 2009. Unlike those previousdiscoveries, the new exoplanet was detected with the help of artificial intelligence researchers at Google using a machine learning technique called neural networking.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers "learn." In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It's been said, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, "the people" (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is emotional and automatic. Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science's help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.