"We are really working on issues that policy makers have never tackled before," Mr. Kratsios, the U.S. deputy chief technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal in his first major interview since his appointment in March. "It's just a question of putting smart people around a table and trying to come up with an innovative approach to regulating" new technologies, he said. To do that, he will need to work closely with the science and tech communities--some of the staunchest critics of Mr. Trump's policies. Leading scientists and tech executives have abandoned White House advisory councils and complained that the president's policies in areas like climate change and immigration threaten to reverse years of economic and social progress. It may help that Mr. Kratsios, 31 years old, hails from the world of technology, having spent seven years as an executive at venture-capital firms founded by Silicon Valley luminary Peter Thiel.

Stuart Russell was born in 1962 in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a professor of computer science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and holder of the Smith–Zadeh Chair in Engineering. In 1990, he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, and in 1995 he was cowinner of the Computers and Thought Award. He was a 1996 Miller Professor of the University of California and was appointed to a Chancellor's Professorship in 2000.

A former executive at Google has filed paperwork with the IRS to establish an official religion of technology. The new church of AI will aim "to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society," according to IRS documents. The non-profit religious organization would be called "Way of the Future" (WOTF). According to the website (wayofthefuture.church), the movement is "about creating a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people'machines.'" "Given that technology will'relatively soon' be able to surpass human abilities, we want to help educate people about this exciting future and prepare a smooth transition," the site explains.

The tech industry can't hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized. That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last week. The group assembled to discuss the meaning of authority in a networked, artificially intelligent world. The panelists quickly zoomed in on the manipulation of Facebook, Google, and other sites by Russians during the U.S. presidential election. They, as well as several other speakers at the conference, painted a dark picture of our current online world for at least the immediate future; they concluded that preventing such manipulation is not going to be easy. "I spent my whole life working in civil liberties, and I didn't see this coming," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Researches have made a breakthrough discovery about the impulsive electron loss that happens in the Earth's upper atmosphere. A paper on the research was published in the Geophysical Review Letters on Wednesday and details the scientific discoveries two spacecraft made about the loss and its cause, according to NASA. The Cubesat FIREBIRD II was one of those craft that recorded the electron microburst when it happened. The craft observed the microbursts from its place orbiting 310 miles above Earth while one of the Van Allen Probes that orbits a bit higher up was able to capture a rising-tone lower band chorus. That chorus of waves had the duration and cadence highly similar to those of the microburst that the FIREBIRD had captured.

'A stable bright light, larger than anything practical shined into my room on the second floor, not making any noise; it disappeared.' It's one of nearly 60,000 unsettling stories revealed in a new map of the contiguous United States, compiling UFO sightings from every state, dating back to 1995. While these mysterious encounters may largely have slipped out of the public eye after the Cold War-era UFO craze died down, the map shows reports have steadily grown in the last two decades, hitting a mid-summer peak each year. The map shows these reports are concentrated in major cities and dense population hubs, making places like New York and the surrounding metropolitan area hotspots for UFO sightings, along with southern and central California. The new map of reported UFO sightings in the US was created by Data Solutions Engineer Adam Crahen of the Data Duo, using data from Kaggle UFO sightings. There's little doubt that the internet has played a role in the growth of UFO reports in recent years, though most can be explained by natural or human-caused phenomena.

This week, the first meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems is taking place at the United Nations in Geneva. Organizations like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots are encouraging the UN to move forward on international regulation of autonomous weapons, which is great, because talking about how these issues will shape the future of robotics and society is a very important thing. Over the weekend, however, I came across a video that struck me as a disturbing contribution to the autonomous weapons debate. The video, called "Slaughterbots" and produced with support from Elon Musk's Future of Life Institute, combines graphic violence with just enough technical plausibility to imagine a very bleak scenario: A fictional near future in which autonomous explosive-carrying microdrones are killing thousands of people around the world. We are not going to embed the video here because it contains a number of violent scenes, including a terrorist attack in a classroom (!). You can find it on the Future of Life website.

You might think having a smart boss must be a good thing, but new research has shown there is an optimal level of intelligence for a leader. Experts found that bosses whose IQ was more than 18 points higher than their employees begin to lose their respect. The results also showed a strong link between intelligence and performance up to an IQ of around 120, after which point this trend begins to go into reverse. The news may cause concern for US President Donald Trump, who is famously proud of his'huge' intellectual prowess. Experts have found that bosses whose IQ is more than 18 points higher than their employees lose their respect.

Wednesday's U.S. military statement says the airstrike was carried out Tuesday evening about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of the capital, Mogadishu, and occurred in coordination with Somalia's government.