Biomedical researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new version of the NCBO Ontology Recommender. Called Ontology Recommender 2.0, it uses a new recommendation approach that evaluates the relevance of an ontology to biomedical text data according to four criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the input data; (2) the acceptance of the ontology in the biomedical community; (3) the level of detail of the ontology classes that cover the input data; and (4) the specialization of the ontology to the domain of the input data. Our evaluation shows that the enhanced recommender provides higher quality suggestions than the original approach, providing better coverage of the input data, more detailed information about their concepts, increased specialization for the domain of the input data, and greater acceptance and use in the community. In addition, it provides users with more explanatory information, along with suggestions of not only individual ontologies but also groups of ontologies. It also can be customized to fit the needs of different scenarios. Ontology Recommender 2.0 combines the strengths of its predecessor with a range of adjustments and new features that improve its reliability and usefulness. Ontology Recommender 2.0 recommends over 500 biomedical ontologies from the NCBO BioPortal platform, where it is openly available.

The history of battle knows no bounds, with weapons of destruction evolving from prehistoric clubs, axes, and spears to bombs, drones, missiles, landmines, and systems used in biological and nuclear warfare. More recently, lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have begun to surface, raising ethical issues about the use of AI and causing disagreement on whether such weapons should be banned in line with international humanitarian laws under the Geneva Convention. Much of the disagreement around LAWS is based on where the line should be drawn between weapons with limited human control and autonomous weapons, and differences of opinion on whether more or less people will lose their lives as a result of the implementation of LAWS. There are also contrary views on whether autonomous weapons are already in play on the battlefield. Ronald Arkin, Regents' Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, says limited autonomy is already present in weapon systems such as the U.S. Navy's Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, which is designed to identify and fire at incoming missiles or threatening aircraft, and Israel's Harpy system, a fire-and-forget weapon designed to detect, attack, and destroy radar emitters.

The Donald Trump administration has asked Congress to give the federal government the ability to track and destroy any type of drone flying on domestic soil, a document obtained by the New York Times reveals. Under the proposal, government agencies and law enforcement would have the ability to monitor and take action against any unmanned aircraft system flying over an area designated for protection. The draft legislation would authorize government agencies to track, take control of and destroy any drone that it determines to be a threat to a "covered facility, location, or installation," which could refer to any number of locations. The proposal would call for the government to respect "privacy, civil rights and civil liberties" when exercising its power to take down drones, but courts would be given no jurisdiction to hear lawsuits filed by drone operators who have their vehicles downed. An exception for drones would be created through the proposal in U.S. hacking and surveillance laws and in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) aircraft regulations, which currently protect the unmanned aircraft.

Drone law is, like the wobbly uncrewed aircraft themselves, hardly settled law. On Friday, the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals overturned an existing rule from the FAA that mandated drone users register in a federal database in an attempt to enforce accountability. According to the decision, the rule did not have the legal standing to apply to anyone flying for hobby or recreational purposes, which is likely most of the over 800,000 people who registered. In the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Congress specified special rules for model airplanes, flown for hobby or recreational purposes, and charged the FAA with creating rules to govern the growing field of small unmanned aerial vehicles, specifically ones that fell outside this hobbyist/model airplane exception. In December 2015, the FAA announced that all owners of unmanned vehicles weighing more than 250 grams (or roughly as much as two sticks of butter) had to register as a drone operator, in a national database of drone users.

NASA's Exploration Mission-1 has stepped closer to reality, as the space agency completed the second flight controller tests for the engines that will power its'megarocket.' Engineers conducted a 500-second test on the component said to be the'brain' of the RS-25 engines – the four engines that will simultaneously provide 2 million pounds of thrust for the Space Launch System (SLS). NASA previously tested the first flight controller in March ahead of installation in one of the EM-1 engines, and once they've reviewed the new data, the second controller will be installed. NASA's Exploration Mission-1 has stepped closer to reality, as the space agency completed the second flight controller tests for the engines that will power its'megarocket.' Engineers conducted a 500-second test on the component said to be the'brain' of the RS-25 engines Nasa's Orion, stacked on a Space Launch System rocket capable of lifting 70 metric tons will launch from a newly refurbished Kennedy Space Center in 2019.

The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea's border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air. What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion -- perhaps a drone flight over the two countries' highly secured border -- turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday. After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons -- likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state's ideological adversaries in the South. Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That's because of the North's continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.

When thousands of football fans pour into Cardiff's Principality Stadium on June 3 to watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League, few will be aware that their faces will have already been scanned, processed, and compared to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest". According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district. Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.

NASA recently launched Mars rovers that students had designed, sending them into space for about 20 minutes to see how they would perform high above Earth's surface. The students working on the robotics project were from Virginia Tech and the University of Central Florida, NASA reported, and they used 3D printing to build the prototypes that could be used to explore Mars but would store easily, with features like folding or collapsible parts. The rocket last week sent them up 154 miles, then brought them down with a parachute into the Atlantic Ocean. "Part of the problem we keep running into is packaging," NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh said in the space agency's statement. "We have to carry a lot of payloads -- rovers, habitats and such. We want to package them on top of the launch vehicle. Rovers have classically been bulky and heavy. The students helped design 18 of the more lightweight and less cumbersome Mars rovers, four of which were built and launched on the NASA rocket. "I have always thought of mass to be the limiting factor in space travel," Virginia Tech student Alex Matta, said in the NASA statement. "Participation in this project led me to realize that minimizing volume of the cargo is important as well." The students offered a fresh set of eyes and minds to the effort. Students watch a NASA rocket carry their Mars rover designs into space. NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh shows off one of the student-made Mars rover designs that recently launched into space. "They come up with these ideas that I cannot come up with," Samareh said. "They have a different mentality.

For decades, technology has relentlessly made phones, laptops, apps and entire industries cheaper and better--while health care has stubbornly loitered in an alternate universe where tech makes everything more expensive and more complex. Now startups are applying artificial intelligence (AI), floods of data and automation in ways that promise to dramatically drive down the costs of health care while increasing effectiveness. If this profound trend plays out, within five to 10 years, Congress won't have to fight about the exploding costs of Medicaid and insurance. Instead, it might battle over what to do with a massive windfall. Today's debate over the repeal of Obamacare would come to seem as backward as a discussion about the merits of leeching. One proof point is in the maelstrom of activity around diabetes, the most expensive disease in the world.

Maoist Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal resigned on Wednesday, leaving a leadership vacuum weeks before the second round of local elections. Dahal took office only nine months ago. The municipal and village assembly vote is the first in the past two decades. The prime minister's exit from government was somewhat expected under a power-sharing deal with the Nepali Congress Party. It came earlier than predicted though after the Communist UML opposition party threatened to block Dahal's speech in parliament, saying the government had created local and municipal bodies without due legal process.