Susie and her computer friend Sadie appeared in 1960s adverts to promote a now defunct UK computer company, accompanied by a young, attractive, nameless woman. Feminised adverts like these were a common ploy in Britain at the time, when male managers, uninitiated in the complexities of this new technology, viewed the machines as intimidating and opaque. "Computers were expensive and using women to advertise them gave the appearance to managers that jobs involving computers are easy and can be done with a cheap labour force," explains technology historian Marie Hicks. They might have been on a typist's salary, but women like the one who appears alongside Susie and Sadie were not typists – they were skilled computer programmers, minus the prestige or pay the modern equivalent might command. As Hicks' book Programmed Inequality illustrates, women were the largest trained technical workforce of the computing industry during the second world war and through to the mid-sixties.

A group of researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is coordinating an effort to better understand the reasoning artificial intelligence algorithms use to arrive at the conclusions they make. Despite the excitement about the potential for utilizing aspects of AI for machine learning and deep learning, widespread adoption in healthcare is some ways off. A better grasp of the reasoning processes could help those efforts. David Gunning, the program manager at Darpa overseeing the project, explained its motivation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The project involves 100 researchers at more than 30 universities and private institutions.

The rivalry between banks and FinTechs has, at times, been tense if not downright combative. Enter APIs to help the two sides coexist more peacefully. API solutions are doing more than helping two different types of financial institutions find ways to collaborate. By integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, companies are relying on API solutions to fight cybersecurity threats and help businesses determine the trustworthiness of a potential trading partner before entering a risky arrangement. Because these solutions that can help reduce the risk of conducting digital commerce, investors are taking notice and writing the big checks with several AI and machine learning solutions securing millions in recent fundraising rounds.

His stark warning came at a time when the US and North Korea remain on heightened alert amid spiraling tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Earlier this week, both sides degenerated to open threats, demonstrating readiness to use coercive force if provoked to do so. Whereas the US said it may rely on strategic bombers to hit North Korean targets, the Asian nation's military announced that a plan of striking the American airbase in Guam will be ready soon. Adding fuel to the crisis, President Donald Trump said the US military assets are "locked and loaded" in case if Pyongyang misbehaves. The heated exchange – coupled by saber-rattling – has revived the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, with many speculating on its impact on global affairs.

A threshold was quietly crossed in the first quarter of 2016. For the first time, mobile carriers reported activating more connected cars than phones. At a vehicle tech demonstration in Manhattan this month, a group of reporters stood around a custom-made, tablet-screened display console as Darrin Shewchuk, a spokesman for Harman International, explained the impending technological revolution. Harman, a company long known for its high-end stereo equipment, is working with Samsung to make sure even more vehicles get connected. "There will be more than 200m connected vehicles on the road around the world by 2020," Shewchuk said, outlining Harman's partnership with Samsung to create a new generation of in-vehicle technology.

Twitter trolls run by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency. Denial of service attacks and ransomware deployed across Ukraine. Spies hidden in the heart of Wall Street. And a century-old fabricated staple of anti-Semitic hate literature. At first glance these disparate phenomena might seem only vaguely connected. Sure, they can all be traced back to Russia. But is there any method to their badness? The definitive answer, according to Russia experts inside and outside the US government, is most certainly yes. In fact, they are part of an increasingly digital intelligence playbook known as "active measures," a wide-ranging set of techniques and strategies that Russian military and intelligence services deploy to influence the affairs of nations across the globe. As the investigation into Russia's influence on the 2016 election--and the Trump campaign's potential participation in that effort--has intensified this summer, the Putin regime's systematic effort to undermine and destabilize democracies has become the subject of urgent focus in the West. According to interviews with more than a dozen US and European intelligence officials and diplomats, Russian active measures represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the Western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consensus: Vladimir Putin, playing a poor hand economically and demographically at home, is seeking to destabilize the multilateral institutions, partnerships, and Western democracies that have kept the peace during the past seven decades.

In his 2014 book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald wrote that a contributing factor to Edward Snowden's decision to leak classified information from the NSA was his consumption of video games: "The moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his pre-adolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual." Whether or not you agree with Snowden's actions, the idea that playing video games could affect a person's ethical position or even encourage any kind of philosophical thought is probably surprising. Yet we're used to the notion that a person's thinking could be influenced by the characters and conundrums in books, film and television; why not games? In fact, games have one big advantage that makes them especially useful for exploring philosophical ideas: they're interactive. As any student of philosophy will tell you, one of the primary ways of engaging with abstract questions is through thought experiments.

In 1963, an American attorney named Reed Lawlor published a prescient article in the journal of the American Bar Association. "In a few years," he wrote, "lawyers will rely more and more on computers to perform many tasks for them. They will not rely on computers simply to do their bookkeeping, filing or other clerical tasks. They will also use them in their research and in the analysis and prediction of judicial decisions. In the latter tasks, they will make use of modern logic and the mathematical theory of probability, at least indirectly."

News stories abound about physical retail stores closing across the United States. Yet, according to data the Commerce Department released earlier this year, online sales only accounted for 8.1 percent of total retail sales in 2016, meaning shoppers still spend the vast majority of their money in stores. And those stores could be getting a jolt, thanks to augmented reality. Augmented reality -- digital information brought into a user's field of view and overlaid onto the real world, which they usually observe through a smartphone or tablet's camera -- has the potential to reshape the retail environment. Not only can AR let customers see digital representations of products before they commit to a purchase, but it also can remove products from store shelves, highlight certain merchandise and provide more information about it.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.