Google's DeepMind Health is a project that utilizes artificial intelligence to learn from data and make the healthcare process efficient. Included in the agreement are plans for developing hospital support systems such as bed and demand management software, financial control products, and private messaging and task management for junior doctors. Another key area in the partnership is real-time health prediction: the use of health care data to identify the risk of patient deterioration, death, and/or readmission. The agreement intends to "maximize the benefit of bringing together two parties who are centers of excellence in their respective fields, including improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety, patient and staff experience, as well as cost reductions."

It's a booming time to be a truck driver. According to data NPR compiled from the US Census Bureau, truck driving is currently the most popular job in 29 states. It's not that truck driving is a particularly sought after career path, however. Rather, it is simply one that is available and pays decently. Unlike a plethora of other jobs that have declined in recent years, truck driving has remained immune to the forces that have elbowed out different lines of work.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

How do you bring a bad drone down? New kinds of drones that can fly autonomously can't be stopped with traditional techniques, the US Air Force has warned. It's put out a call for ideas to yank drones right out of the sky. Millions of drones are sold worldwide each year. Most are flown for fun, but a few have been put to criminal use: carrying cameras to bedroom windows, flying into secure airspace over nuclear power stations, and smuggling contraband into prisons.

The threat of killer robots may sound a little far-fetched but this latest'harmful robot' suggests we may have taken a step closer to this dystopian reality. Roboticist Alexander Reben from the University of Berkeley, California, has created a bot called "The First Law" that is capable of pricking a finger, but is programmed to choose not to every time if it means avoiding being switched off. Ultimately, it can decide whether or not to inflict pain to serve its own interest. The robot is named after the first law in a set of rules devised by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, which - quoted as being from the Handbook of Robotics, 2058 AD – states "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm". Reben's research paper explains how the robot operates in relation to "reinforcement learning agents" and how they are unlikely to behave optimally all the time.

In the early 1970s, at Silicon Valley's Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells that could communicate via simple messages. Each cell would perform its own discrete task. But in communicating with the rest, it would form a more complex whole. "This is an almost foolproof way of operating," Kay once told me. Computer programmers could build something large by focusing on something small.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

Chris Drozd, left, and Stefan Salvatore leave flowers and pictures for victims of the nightclub shooting on Sunday, at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, Monday, June 13, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. A gunman opened fire in a crowded Orlando nightclub early Sunday killing dozens of people. President Barack Obama, left, speaks to members of the media in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, June 13, 2016, after getting briefed on the investigation of a shooting at a nightclub in Orlando by FBI Director James Comey, right, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, not shown, and other officials. Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president of software engineering, speaks at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, Monday, June 13, 2016. Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the club in Orlando, Florida, claimed to support Islamic State extremists, as well opposing groups such as Hezbolla and Nusra Front.

Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the club in Orlando, Florida, claimed to support Islamic State extremists, as well opposing groups such as Hezbolla and Nusra Front. Large crowds gather for the "OneOrlando Vigil" in the city where the rampage occurred, while other memorials are being held across the country. Officials scrutinized Omar Mateen for making radical, violent statements in 2013, then investigated him again in 2014 because he was casually acquainted with a suicide bomber. Donald Trump vows to impose bans on immigrants from parts of the world associated with terrorism, while Hillary Clinton warns that demonizing all Muslims would only play into the hands of extremists. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls for Labour Party supporters to vote to stay in the European Union.

The Sorting Hat is no longer confined to fiction – a solutions architect for IBM Watson has developed a real-life version of the all-knowing Harry Potter artefact. Powered by multiple Watson services, the hat was trained to sort the wearer into one of the four Hogwarts'Houses' based on distinctive character traits. The researchers have added animatronics to the design to bring their sorting hat to life, including a voice, a moving mouth, and colour-changing LED eyes, and the smart hat has even tested its abilities by sorting the presidential candidates. The Sorting Hat is no longer confined to fiction – a solutions architect for IBM Watson has developed a real-life version of the all-knowing Harry Potter artefact. Powered by multiple Watson services, the hat was trained to sort the wearer into one of the four Hogwarts'Houses' Anderson and his daughter trained the hat to sort people among the four Hogwarts Houses.