TOLEDO, OHIO – Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie's surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the shallowest of the Great Lakes. It's one of the most wide-ranging freshwater monitoring systems in the U.S., researchers say, and some of its pieces soon will be watching for harmful algae on hundreds of lakes nationwide. Researchers are creating an early warning system using real-time data from satellites that in recent years have tracked algae bloom hotpots such as Florida's Lake Okeechobee and the East Coast's Chesapeake Bay. The plan is to have it in place within two years so that states in the continental U.S. can be alerted to where toxic algae is appearing before they might detect it on the surface, said Blake Schaeffer, a researcher with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "You don't have to wait until someone gets sick," said Schaeffer, one of the leaders of the project.

Reinforcement learning algorithms that can reliably learn how to control robots, etc. Better generative models. Algorithms that can reliably learn how to generate images, speech and text that humans can't tell apart from the real thing. Learning to learn and ubiquitous deep learning. Right now it still takes a human expert to run the learning-to-learn algorithm, but in the future it will be easier to deploy, and all kinds of businesses that don't specialize in AI will be able to leverage deep learning. More cyberattacks will leverage machine learning to make more autonomous malware, more efficient fuzzing for vulnerabilities, etc. More cyberdefenses will leverage machine learning to respond faster than a human could, detect more subtle intrusions, etc. ML algorithms from opposing camps will fool each other to carry out both attacks and defensive actions.

Researches at Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence (AI) program after it created its own language, Digital Journal reports. The system developed code words to make communication more efficient and researchers took it offline when they realized it was no longer using English. The incident, after it was revealed in early July, puts in perspective Elon Musk's warnings about AI. "AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive," Musk said at the meet of US National Governors Association. "Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it'll be too late." When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Musk's warnings are "pretty irresponsible," Musk responded that Zuckerberg's "understanding of the subject is limited."

Do you know what is common between San Bernardino's shooting spree and the terrorist attacks in Paris last month? Jillennials, Jihadis who are Millennials. We mine data worldwide, a lot of it, a ton of it, every day and every night, and we do this for a living at PredictifyMe. We have partnership with the United Nations to protect school-goers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and Lebanon using our proprietary software SecureSim and Soothsayer . When the Paris attacks unfolded, we asked ourselves (and our database), how can we use data sciences to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Can we find out what factors influence an otherwise ordinary citizen to become radicalized?

Nearly every step wrought havoc upon the prototype walker's frame. Designed to activate landmines in the most direct means possible, the EOD robot was nevertheless persistent enough to pick itself back up after each explosion and hobble forth in search of more damage. It continued on until it could barely crawl, its broken metal belly scraping across the scorched earth as it dragged itself by a single remaining limb. The scene proved to be too much for those in attendance. The colonel in charge of the demonstration quickly put an end to the macabre display, reportedly unable to stand the scene before him.

Any ammunition storage location, full of explosives collected in one place, makes a tempting target. For an attacker, the hard part is getting an explosive inside the perimeter to set it off. Drones are the ideal mechanism for this mayhem. Relatively cheap and expendable, a drone's major limitation is how much weight it can carry. In this case, the aerial vehicle seems to have transported a Russian-made ZMG-1 thermite grenade.

The announcement by the Taiwanese giant Foxconn that it will build an LCD-manufacturing facility in Wisconsin worth an estimated $10bn was met with considerable fanfare. But the state has a troubled history in matters of economic development, and the company, a supplier to Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants, has a lackluster record when it comes to fulfilling its promises. The news should raise red flags. The deal, backers say, will create 13,000 jobs in six years – in return for a reported $3bn in state subsidies. Only 3,000 of those jobs will come immediately.

Figures released last week show that Google spent a record amount of almost $6m lobbying in Washington DC in the past three months, putting the Silicon Valley behemoth on track to be the top corporate lobbying spending in the US. Last year it ranked number two, behind Comcast. Given the increased antitrust scrutiny that is coming from the Democrats' new "Better Deal" policy platform, Donald Trump's random tweets attacking fellow tech giant Amazon for its connection to the Washington Post, and his adviser Steve Bannon's recent comments that Google and Facebook should be regulated as utilities, it is likely Google will only increase its lobbying expenditure in the next few months. The largest monopoly in America, Google controls five of the top six billion-user, universal web platforms – search, video, mobile, maps and browser – and leads in 13 of the top 14 commercial web functions, according to Scott Cleland at Precursor Consulting. As the controversial Trump-supporting PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel points out, companies like Google don't like to advertise this fact.

Late last year, some WikiLeaks supporters were growing concerned: What had happened to Julian Assange? The then-45-year-old founder of the anti-secrecy publisher was no stranger to controversy. Since 2012, he has sheltered in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, London, following allegations of sexual assault. But the publication of leaked emails from Democratic Party officials in the run-up to the US presidential election saw Assange wield unprecedented influence while at the center of a global media firestorm. After the election, though, suspicions were growing that something had happened to him.

A famous idiom states that nothing in this life is certain other than death and taxes. Yet, of the many ways that the films and novels of science fiction have imagined the roles of robots in our high-tech future, paying taxes has generally not been one of the functions dreamed up for our android friends. Nonetheless, the futuristic-sounding concept of a "robot tax" is now a real topic in Europe and beyond, if still being quite a distance from becoming a real thing. For many years, issues around the rapid digitalization of the working environment and the increasing use of automation and robotics have energized economic and social debate. A long established argument is that increasingly rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation - a so-called "robot revolution" - will ultimately leave huge numbers unemployed, with no sector of the labor market left untouched.