Artificial intelligence: Savvy hospitals are deploying AI and its technological brethren cognitive computing and machine learning in specific use cases at this point – while industry luminaries are predicting that their advancement will soon start happening more quickly than previously anticipated. "I've never in my career seen the acceleration of technology as fast as what we've witnessed in machine learning during the last two years," said Dale Sanders, executive vice president at Health Catalyst. Sanders, it's worth noting, has a U.S. Air Force background working on stacked neural networks and fuzzy logic, which used to be called deep learning, as well as serving as the CIO of both Northwestern University and national health system of the Cayman Islands. "The rate of improvement happening in machine learning," Sanders added, "is way beyond what Moore's Law is to chips." Hospitals already deploying AI As the next generation of both patients and caregivers – including clinicians, doctors, nurses, specialists, even executives and administrators – starts taking a foothold in the healthcare workforce, hospitals looking for a first-mover advantage already know that AI is on the verge of becoming a critical component across the entire organization, and not just IT. "AI and machine learning are exciting opportunities for us to accelerate," Carolinas HealthCare Chief Information and Analytics Officer Craig Richardville said.

Demi Lovato: James Corden is the best damn diva Corden, for his part, covered Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin, but his standout moment was during his banter with Lovato. James Corden and Demi Lovato channeled their inner divas during a riff-off on Wednesday night's "The Late Late Show". Aetna will not sell 2018 Obamacare exchange plans in Iowa Earlier this week the Iowa Insurance Commission announced that Wellmark would also no longer provide individual plans in Iowa. Medica could be the only choice for individual policies in Iowa for 2018, and the company declined to declare its intentions. Divisions remain when it comes to repealing Obamacare From its onset, the Kentucky senator opposed the AHCA for the same reasons that members of the Freedom Caucus cited.

Earlier this year, the chairman of the UK's National Cyber Management Centre warned that "a major bank will fail as a result of a cyber attack in 2017". Scarily, this does not seem so far-fetched. Indeed, it is predicted that cyber crime costs will reach US$2 trillion by 20191. An increasingly connected world and rapid technological innovation is creating broader and more diverse opportunities for cyber attacks. Use of Artificial Intelligence ('AI') by companies to detect and counter such cyber attacks is becoming increasingly more commonplace.

Comcast is introducing its new wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, later this year. Xfinity Mobile is trying to personalize wireless. How do you feel about Comcast as your wireless carrier? Comcast customers will soon have that option. The cable TV powerhouse spilled the beans on Xfinity Mobile, a new service launching mid-year that leverages Wi-Fi, as well as Verizon's 4G LTE cellular network.

Nasa is planning ambitious mission that will see a robotic spaceship visit an asteroid to create an orbiting base for astronauts. The robot ship will pluck a large boulder off the space rock and sling it around the moon, becoming a destination to prepare for future human missions to Mars. Nasa plans to study the asteroid for about a year and test deflection techniques that one day may be necessary to save Earth from a potentially catastrophic collision. Although the target asteroid is not expected to be officially selected until 2020, NASA is using 2008 EV5 as the reference asteroid while the search continues for potential alternates. Before beginning its trip to lunar orbit, the ARM spacecraft will demonstrate a widely supported asteroid deflection technique called a gravity tractor.

Whether you are based in Washington or Beijing, automation anxiety is something that could be keeping you awake at night. What will the future of work look like if more and more companies replace humans with machines? The leaders of two of the world's biggest economies, US President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jingping, met this week to discuss business and trade. They oversee a workforce of 900 million people. In the past, Trump has blamed China for taking US jobs.

Inspite of all the current hype, AI is not a new field of study, but it has its ground in the fifties. If we exclude the pure philosophical reasoning path that goes from the Ancient Greek to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Pascal, AI as we know it has been officially started in 1956 at Dartmouth College, where the most eminent experts gathered to brainstorm on intelligence simulation. This happened only a few years after Asimov set his own three laws of robotics, but more relevantly after the famous paper published by Turing (1950), where he proposes for the first time the idea of a thinking machine and the more popular Turing test to assess whether such machine shows, in fact, any intelligence. As soon as the research group at Dartmouth publicly released the contents and ideas arisen from that summer meeting, a flow of government funding was reserved for the study of creating a nonbiological intelligence. Atthat time, AI seemed to be easily reachable, but it turned out that was not the case.

The implantable device aims to convert neurons in the brain into electronic signals and provide unprecedented "data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA statement announcing the new project. DARPA sees the implant as providing a foundation for new therapies that could help people with deficits in sight or hearing by "feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain." A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications. But some experts see such an implant as having the potential for numerous applications, including military ones, in the field of wearable robotics -- which aims to augment and restore human performance. Conor Walsh, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Harvard University, told CNN that the implant would "change the game," adding that "in the future, wearable robotic devices will be controlled by implants."

The last time we mentioned the Navy's long-range MQ-4C Triton drone was in 2013, and the project is still creeping towards eventual deployment. Northrop Grumman announced this week that it has completed formal lab testing, and also successfully flew for the first time with a software upgrade adding "Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), multi-aircraft control and additional Multi-Function Active Sensor (MFAS) radar modes." Once it's ready, this autonomous vehicle is intended for providing intelligence and recon during flights that can last up to 24 hours at a time, allowing it to monitor 1 million square miles of the ocean. The plan now is for the MQ-4C to enter "Early Operational Capability (EOC)" deployment next year.

Cassini, the spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn for 13 years, is running out of fuel and nearing the end of its mission. Over the next few months, Cassini will dive into the space between Saturn and its rings, moving closer and closer to the planet until it eventually disintegrates in its atmosphere in September. This week, NASA released a short animation showing these final moments, set to a majestic, brassy overture. "On its final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn, fighting to keep its antenna pointed at Earth as it transmits its farewell," a comforting voice narrates as the music swells. "In the skies of Saturn, the journey ends, as Cassini becomes part of the planet itself."