GM CEO Mary stands next to a Chevrolet Bolt EV self-driving car at a news conference in Detroit on Dec. 15, 2016. With billions of dollars committed to research and testing of vehicles driven by artificial intelligence rather than humans, the last thing automakers and tech firms want is balkanized regulations that vary from state to state or out-of-date federal rules for this fast-developing technology. So General Motors, Toyota, Volvo and ride-hailing service Lyft had a unified message for members of the House of Representatives on Tuesday: Set a national framework for testing and deploying autonomous vehicles -- and do it soon. "One of the most significant challenges that we face today with respect to the testing of autonomous vehicle technology is the patchwork of policy initiatives at the state level," Gill Pratt, CEO of the Silicon Valley-based Toyota Research Institute, said in testimony to the House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection. "More and more states are developing legislation and regulations that are unfortunately creating impediments to the development of autonomous vehicle technology."

SAN FRANCISCO--Cryptographers said at the RSA Conference Tuesday they're skeptical that advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence will profoundly transform computer security. "I'm skeptical there will be much of an impact," Ron Rivest, a MIT professor and inventor of several symmetric key encryption algorithms, said early at the annual Cryptographers' Panel here. Susan Landau, a professor who specializes in cybersecurity policy and computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said that while artificial intelligence can be helpful when it comes to processing lots of data effectively, she doesn't think it will be useful in fingering out series attacks or anomalous situations. Adi Shamir, Borman Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute, said he was optimistic about AI's potential when it comes to defense – anything that involves finding deviations in behavior – but said he doubts it can ever be used in offensive sense, such as in identifying zero days, something he said requires more ingenuity and originality. The discussion was steered by a report recently released by the Global Risk Institute on the emergence of quantum computing technologies.

It's called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Curiously, rapid developments happening in fields previously thought to be disjointed are now amplifying each other. We are seeing this in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, genetics and biotechnology. On a different tangent altogether, smart systems are able to address a diverse set of issues ranging from climate to supply chains. What must be underscored here is a sense of urgency. Perhaps less than five years is what we have to enable this transition.

Love is in the air and one man is trying to make America date again. Turns out that those who voted for the President are looking for like-minded partners, just as people with specific professions or the same religion turn to certain dating sites to find a match. The site's founder David Goss started the site after seeing there was one like it for supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was in the running for President and the Democratic nomination, according to CNET. While you can browse single supporters in your area for free, you can't contact them without signing up for the site and paying the fees associated with use. Users can either pay a monthly fee of $19.99 or pay in smaller amounts for credits that earn them messages to other users, says CNET.

Terns are a family of shorebirds that can nest in marginal conditions and thrive everywhere from beaches to wetlands to rivers to inlets. TERN, or the Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node, is a drone developed by Northrop Grumman for both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, with the goal of giving the Navy and Marine Corps a versatile flying scout that can support ships and troops almost anywhere they may be. Today, DARPA announced funding for Phase III of the project, which aims to take it from a mere concept to a working, flying, fighting robot by 2018. So what, exactly, does TERN do? It perches on ships, even small ships without runways, and then takes off vertically like a helicopter, before transitioning to plane-like horizontal flight in midair.

"We didn't need dialogue," Norma Desmond tells a young screenwriter in "Sunset Boulevard," recalling her silent-film-era glory days. Screenwriters famously suffer all sorts of indignities--dumb studio notes, credit squabbles--but now and then they get to win Oscars. Norma's heyday was just fading when the first Academy Awards were held, in 1929; the three writing categories that year were Best Original Story, Best Adapted Story, and (for the first and last time) Best Title Writing. It took several decades for the categories to settle into the modern dichotomy of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay, though the distinction can be tricky: originality, of course, is relative. This year's nominees draw on a wide range of sources, including the untold history of NASA, Jacques Demy musicals, science fiction, several lost mothers, and two plays about black life half a century apart.

Recent breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence mean AI-enabled technologies are gaining traction. The billion-dollar cybersecurity industry is no exception, as vendors begin to scale and automate their processes intelligently – all while locked into the early stages of a security arms race with professional hackers. A recent report from analyst firm ABI Research estimates that machine learning in cybersecurity will enormously bolster spending in big data, intelligence and analytics, reaching as much as $96 billion (£71.9 billion) by 2021. Vendors are likely to find buyers in large enterprises, and more than likely, across industries that are especially prone to attack: think government and defence, banking, and across the technology sector. At the moment, ABI's report says, User and Entity Behavioural Analytics – using machine learning for threat detection by analysing data at scale – is the driving force. "Using static machine learning models to detect previously unknown malware is the only use case I'm aware of that offers clear evidence of effective results," says cybersecurity analyst at 451 Research, Adrian Sanabria.

Every year, we are confronted with new facts and scenarios emerging out of climate change and global warming, each more terrifying and apocalyptic than the last. In fact, several well-known scientists and tech moguls have made predictions regarding them. Prominent linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky said last year that the COP22 Marrakech climate summit in Morocco, which began on Nov. 7, "basically ceased" to function on Nov.9 after the delegates were confronted with the news that Donald Trump was elected as the next U.S. president. Speaking to over 2,000 people at Riverside Church on Dec. 5, Chomsky also made several related climate change predictions. "The question that was left was whether it would be possible to carry forward this global effort to deal with the highly critical problem of environmental catastrophe, if the leader of the free world, the richest and most powerful country in history, would pull out completely, as appeared to be the case," Chomsky said.

We are at the point where computers and machines are no longer going to be simply tools. Computers are becoming, literally, part of us. "There are a couple of very interesting things happening as we speak facilitating humans and machines working together in a very different way," said Justin Sanchez, director of the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA. Smart exoskeletons help people with paralysis walk again, give soldiers extra strength and endurance, and implanted computer chips help the blind see again or help others feel a sense of touch in a prosthetic foot. It might not be a sci-fi vision of cyborgs, but a near future where soldiers might have implanted chips that help them communicate in the battlefield or receive information from GPS systems or drones.

Mini drones sporting horsehair coated in a sticky gel could one day take the pressure off beleaguered bee populations by transporting pollen from plant to plant, researchers said. Roughly three-quarters of the world's flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world's food crops depend on animals to pollinate them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of nature's most prolific pollinators are bees, but bee populations are declining around the world, and last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a native species as endangered for the first time. Now, researchers from Japan said they've taken the first steps toward creating robots that could help pick up the slack from insect pollinators. The scientists created a sticky gel that lets a $100 matchbox-size drone pick up pollen from one flower and deposit it onto another to help the plants reproduce.