As people seek affirmation of their political beliefs in an increasingly polarized nation with accusations of fake news from both sides, smart device AI (artificial intelligence) is more than happy to comply. Concise, loaded questions tend to yield loaded results when querying Google Assistant, the voice-activated AI technology that comes with Google Pixel phones and Google Home – the latter a voice-activated speaker. When I asked Google Assistant, "Is Donald Trump a racist?" And if your question is rephrased in less-raw, accusatory terms such as, "Is President Trump racially insensitive?" the top results are, again, the Huffington Post story and stories like Vox's "Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism." Jump the political divide and former President Barack Obama doesn't get off that easy either but top results don't tend to be from large media organizations, which have been accused of being softer on the former president than the current commander-in-chief.

There is a gaping hole in the digital defences that companies use to keep out cyber thieves. The hole is the global shortage of skilled staff that keeps security hardware running, analyses threats and kicks out intruders. Currently, the global security industry is lacking about one million trained workers, suggests research by ISC2 - the industry body for security professionals. The deficit looks set to grow to 1.8 million within five years, it believes. The shortfall is widely recognised and gives rise to other problems, says Ian Glover, head of Crest - the UK body that certifies the skills of ethical hackers.

Beginning in 2006 beekeepers became aware that their honeybee populations were dying off at increasingly rapid rates. Scientists are also concerned about the dwindling populations of monarch butterflies. Researchers have been scrambling to come up with explanations and an effective strategy to save both insects or replicate their pollination functions in agriculture. Although the Plan Bee drones pictured above are just one SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) student's concept for how a swarm of drones could handle pollinating an indoor crop, scientists are considering different options for dealing with the crisis, using modern technology to replace living bees with robotic ones.Researchers from the Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard introduced the first RoboBees in 2013, and other scientists around the world have been researching and designing their solutions ever since. Honeybees pollinate almost a third of all the food we consume and, in the U.S., account for more than $15 billion worth of crops every year.

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies? Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the NHS budget will need to increase by £88billion over the next 50 years if it is to keep pace with the rising demand for healthcare in the UK. But with the 2017 Budget showcasing a massive leaning towards building up its Brexit reserves and allocating a mere £100 million for 100 onsite GP treatment centres in A&Es across England, the NHS is justifiably bracing itself for a painful future. With £20billion worth of cuts scheduled by 2020, combined with fierce warnings that the UK's health services are on the edge of an unprecedented crisis, the urgent call for solutions to be brought to the healthcare table has incontrovertibly intensified. With deep cuts looming, it's time to properly consider how Artificial Intelligence can answer this call and shed light on how its technologies could provide the healthcare industry with some much-needed respite and real solutions to meet the ever spiralling rise in demand for healthcare. The issue of voluminous data that draws relentlessly on healthcare professionals' resources is something that could benefit significantly from the implementation of an AI-based system.

How can scientists deal with the huge volume of new research publish on a daily basis? How can computers go further than merely parsing scientific papers, and actually suggest hypotheses themselves? When will we see a computer as another member of the lab team, serving hundreds of scientists simultaneously from its huge data set of extant research? This is the work of John Bachman, a systems biology PhD from Harvard Medical School, and Ben Giori, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School's systems pharmacology lab. They're part of Darpa's Big Mechanism project, which is developing technology to read research abstracts and papers to extract pieces of causal mechanisms, then to assemble these pieces into more complete causal models, and to produce explanations.

Ubisoft Senior Producer Mathieu Ferland demonstrates Dig Rush, created by Ubisoft and Amblyotech to be the first therapeutic video game used for the treatment of'lazy eye.' (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images) "Make sure you play your video game," is not something you commonly hear parents say to kids. But Amblyotech's Amblyopad device armed with Ubisoft's video games Dig Rush and Monster Burner may change this...at least in some households. Amblyotech just filed for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for these games to help treat "lazy eye," which is the lazier way of saying amblyopia. Amblyopia is when the one of your eye's vision is reduced because, as the National Eye Institute (NEI) describes, "the eye and the brain are not working together properly." In this condition which affects 3% of children, your brain favors using one eye over the other (assuming that you only have two eyes), perhaps because your eyes are misaligned (also called strabismus) or the vision in one eye is impaired.

Dr. Ayanna Howard (1972 –) has some impressive credentials. She is a noted expert in the area of Artificial Intelligence. She is often referred to as an "old school Blerd" (Black Nerd). Her motivation to pursue a career in the sciences was fueled by watching TV shows such as, The Bionic Woman, Star Trek, and Wonder Woman" as a child. Howard has worked as a roboticist and Motorola Foundation Professor at Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines.

At the heart of AI systems are statistical models that have no concept of social inequality, fairness, or hardships. In Cathy O'Neil's book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMD), she points out that big data is discriminating nearly at every juncture of our society and pummeling the poor at each opportunity. Her book points to many avenues of misuse of data, but most offensive is through the use of proxies. Data statistics that are designed for one purpose but are repurposed to be used for economic or convenience sake. There are a number of examples of this.

Political speech and the freedom to engage in political activity without being subjected to undue government scrutiny are at the heart of the First Amendment,