The trucking industry scored a victory this week when Republican lawmakers effectively blocked Obama administration safety rules aimed at keeping tired truckers off the highway. The American Trucking Associations is pledging to come back next month, when Republicans will control the White House and Congress, and try to block state laws that require additional rest breaks for truckers beyond what federal rules require. The group says there should be one uniform national rule on work hours for interstate truckers. The trucking industry's latest triumph has caused concern among safety advocates that it may signal the start of a broad rollback of transportation safety regulations once there's no longer a Democratic president to check the tendency of Republican lawmakers to side with industry. "Unfortunately, it's going to be an open season on safety in this coming Congress."

On the day that I was born--winter solstice, 1959--a headline in Life magazine proclaimed "Target Venus: There May be Life There!" It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus's atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid I thrilled to tales of undersea adventure with telepathic Venusian frogs in Isaac Asimov's juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. In 1975, when I was 15, a family friend--a planetary scientist--gave me a picture of the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet: Venus. The Soviet Venera 9 probe had sent back a black-and-white image of a landscape with angular rocks and fine-grained dirt.

During his campaign for president, Donald Trump claimed Amazon was a monopoly he would go after for anti-trust violations if elected. Sure, Trump didn't like the coverage he was receiving in the Washington Post, which Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns. But even just judging by the latest holiday sales numbers, Amazon so decisively dominates online shopping that other retail giants can barely compete. If Trump decided to make good on his promise, should Bezos be worried? Amazon's dominance is just that: a company outdoing the competition in capitalism's grand tradition. If success alone were against the law, then yes.

In just one year, self-driving cars have gone from the theoretical to the imminent. Major manufacturers are leaping into development. The U.S. Department of Transportation issued new rules in September giving the federal government broad oversight over vehicles operated by software rather than by humans. Discussion of the technology's pros and cons has become a staple in publications as mainstream as the New York Times. But now that the first fatality has occurred, we need to take a closer look at the implications and challenges of autonomous vehicles. At the moment, the focus is on self-driving versions of today's automobiles.

The obvious approach is to implement an unsupervised, machine learning protective shield that delivers a defense layer to fortify IT security. A self-learning system with the flexibility of being able to cast a rapidly scalable safety net across an organization's information ecosystem, distributed or centralized, local or global, cloud or on-premise. Whether data resides in a large health system or is the ERP system of a large energy company or a financial institution, rogue users are identified instantly.

Avatar breakthrough as AI that can create a perfect 3D face from a single picture is revealed (and they've tried it out on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and even Muhammad Ali) The stunning maps made from three million satellite images... The'golden cigar' UFO: Strange object flashes red and blue... The future of flying: NASA tests radical new embedded jet... Would YOU grow cannabis in your kitchen? The stunning maps made from three million satellite images... The'golden cigar' UFO: Strange object flashes red and blue...

After posting my article A Plethora of Data Set Repositories, I received a few messages from people and companies that have also collected a lot of data, and share it with the public. Below are two such sources. Also, you can always find new data sets by searching for data sets on DSC. The data sets that I checked were available in CSC format, and rather small. They can be found here.

The stunning maps made from three million satellite images... The'golden cigar' UFO: Strange object flashes red and blue... The future of flying: NASA tests radical new embedded jet... Would YOU grow cannabis in your kitchen? The stunning maps made from three million satellite images... The'golden cigar' UFO: Strange object flashes red and blue...

IMAGE: The Argonne research team that has pioneered the use of machine learning tools in 2-D material modeling. Machine learning, a field focused on training computers to recognize patterns in data and make new predictions, is helping doctors more accurately diagnose diseases and stock analysts forecast the rise and fall of financial markets. And now materials scientists have pioneered another important application for machine learning -- helping to accelerate the discovery and development of new materials. Researchers at the Center for Nanoscale Materials and the Advanced Photon Source, both U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facilities at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, announced the use of machine learning tools to accurately predict the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials. In a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, a team of researchers led by Argonne computational scientist Subramanian Sankaranarayanan described their use of machine learning tools to create the first atomic-level model that accurately predicts the thermal properties of stanene, a two-dimensional (2-D) material made up of a one-atom-thick sheet of tin.

Cruz opened up last Wednesday's hearing by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness with an abrupt reminder that AI is becoming such a predominant part of our lives that investments in it will increase by 300 percent in the new few years. "Whether we recognize it or not," Cruz said, during the meeting, "artificial intelligence is already seeping into our daily lives." The speech was one in a number of rare addresses concerning artificial intelligence on the Senate floor. During the hearing, Dr. Andrew Moore from Carnegie Mellon University and Dr. Eric Horvitz, Managing Director at Microsoft Research Lab, discussed how a variety of technologies have created an "inflection point" whereby computing speed, automation, and deep learning will combine to drive AI technology further into human lives. Several speakers, including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, discussed the impact AI would have on the human workforce and, ultimately, the economy.