When the residents of Flint learned that lead had contaminated their water system, the local government made water-testing kits available to them free of charge. The city government published the results of these tests, creating a valuable dataset that is key to understanding the causes and extent of the lead contamination event in Flint. This is the nation's largest dataset on lead in a municipal water system. In this paper, we predict the lead contamination for each household's water supply, and we study several related aspects of Flint's water troubles, many of which generalize well beyond this one city. For example, we show that elevated lead risks can be (weakly) predicted from observable home attributes. Then we explore the factors associated with elevated lead. These risk assessments were developed in part via a crowd sourced prediction challenge at the University of Michigan. To inform Flint residents of these assessments, they have been incorporated into a web and mobile application funded by \texttt{Google.org}. We also explore questions of self-selection in the residential testing program, examining which factors are linked to when and how frequently residents voluntarily sample their water.

Five young inventors from Gambia are the latest students to be denied visas to enter the US for a prestigious international robotics contest in Washington. The teens found the rejection'very disheartening,' their coach, Mucktarr Darboe, said on Tuesday. Darboe, who is also a director in the largely Muslim West African nation's ministry of higher education, said the students were not given a reason for the visa denials in April, and he called the decision'disappointing and unfair.' The US Embassy in Banjul, Gambia's capital, could not immediately be reached for comment. Mucktarr Darboe is pictured with members of Gambia's student team that was denied visas to travel to Washington for a robotics contest Gambia has been through dramatic change in recent months, ousting via elections a longtime dictator, Yahya Jammeh, whose administration was accused of human rights abuses.

HERAT, AFGHANISTAN/DAKAR – Two Afghan girls refused visas to the United States for a robot-building competition said on Tuesday they were mystified by the decision, as the contest's organizers said teams from Iran and Sudan as well as a de facto Syrian team had gained visas. The unusual story of the Afghan all-girl team of robotics students emerged as the United States grapples with the legality of President Donald Trump's order to temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan itself is not on the list and Team Afghanistan's robot, unlike its creators, has been allowed entry to the United States. Asked by Reuters on Tuesday why the girls were banned, a U.S. State Department spokesperson cited regulations prohibiting the agency from discussing individual visa cases. So the six team members will watch the ball-sorting machine compete in Washington D.C. via video link during the July 16-18 event from their hometown of Herat, in western Afghanistan, according to the FIRST Global contest organizers.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict which embryos will result in IVF success. In a new study, AI was found to be more accurate than embryologists at pinpointing which embryos had the potential to result in the birth of a healthy baby. Experts from Sao Paulo State University in Brazil have teamed up with Boston Place Clinic in London to develop the technology in collaboration with Dr Cristina Hickman, scientific adviser to the British Fertility Society. They believe the inexpensive technique has the potential to transform care for patients and help women achieve pregnancy sooner. During the process, AI was "trained" in what a good embryo looks like from a series of images.

Most of the female team members were either infants or not yet born at the time of the U.S.-backed military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime – whose ultra-hardline interpretation of sharia (Islamic law) banned girls from school, women from working outside the home and all females from leaving home without a male relative.

While cybercriminals are able to compromise a system in hours or minutes, the reaction of companies usually takes months or even years. In fact, 18% of new malware remains undetected in the first 24 hours and 2% continues 3 months after infection, according to IDG Research. In this situation, artificial intelligence is becoming the strategic ally of business security, reducing that time frame for the detection of threats and even anticipating attacks that have not occurred. Cybercriminals are aware that information is the most valuable asset that companies have in the digital economy and, therefore, take advantage of the abundant entry points that hyperconnected work environments have generated. Traditional security methods are demonstrating their inability to protect companies against threats that grow in volume and sophistication, leading to a greater "window of opportunity for malware."

FIRST Global holds the annual robotics competition to encourage learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, around the world. It invites one team from each country in an effort to build bridges, organizers said. This year's competition takes place from July 16-18.

So the data deal between Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. So says the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator charged with upholding data protection rules. The deal, the ICO said, erred in several ways. Royal Free should have notified its patients before handing their data to DeepMind, giving them a chance to opt out.

The future of work

During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"--as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way. They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say "this couldn't possibly happen to anyone reading this now."