FILE - In this May 25, 2016, file photo, an Afghan man reads a local newspaper with photos the former leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan. A senior U.S. defense official says the administration is moving toward a decision to expand the military's authority to conduct airstrikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The official says a final decision has not been made. But there is a broad desire to give the military greater ability to help the Afghan forces.

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured Adminstrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics, before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003 -- a position Goldin never officially held, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start, though he still got a 1.8 million payout. And then, Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over ten years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he's been working on for the last decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor. "I'm not an incrementalist; I wanted to wait for the grand slam," Goldin tells Business Insider.

National Science foundation has given a four-year grant to Researchers from University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College. This grant has been awarded for analysing images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust collected by NASA's Curiosity rover. Since 2012, the rover has been exploring a crater on Mars and has been sending lots of information through a process called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. In this process, a laser is shone on a rock, which is heated to high temperatures and then the radiations are picked up by a small camera, which is placed on the rover and sent back to Earth for further studies and analysis. NVIDIA plays an important part in this processing.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes, and that's just as true in cybersecurity as it is in health. So believes Cylance, a startup that uses AI to detect and prevent cyberattacks. On Wednesday, Cylance announced that it just raised a whopping 100 million in Series D funding. It will use the new infusion to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering programs. Dubbed CylanceProtect, the company's flagship product promises AI-based endpoint security while using a fraction of the system resources required by the approaches used in most enterprises today.

I think there's a special stigma when people say they're supporting Trump, because of some of the brash things that he's said,

A new surveillance technology will allow for the immediate, automatic detection of suspicious behaviour in live video feeds. The research project, led by the IARPA unit at the U.S. Office of National Intelligence, proposes a recognition system dubbed Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA), which is able to scour through multiple live video streams and pick out potential criminal and terror activities. Describing the project, IARPA officials noted: 'The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multi-camera network. The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios.' The technology is designed to pore through video surveillance and other incoming camera footage to search for new threats, as well as to identify individuals and objects already flagged by the authorities as posing a danger.

America has a prison problem. Although the United States accounts for just 4.4 percent of the world's population, we account for 22 percent of the world's overall prisoner population. All this attempted correction comes at both social and financial expense. America spent around 80 billion on prisons, jails, probation, and parole in 2010, according to a report by The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair, and too costly – in every sense of the word – and we need to start to change it," heralded the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann on Tuesday in Washington, DC.

Transcription is the bane of my existence. Yes, it is fun to be a journalist, yes it is fun to travel around the country talking to diverse and interesting people, yes it is fun to weave those people into broader stories about the world at large. But there's a middle step in there in which I come home with reams of audio interviews that I've recorded that I have to type up. And that part is not fun. For my job, I travel somewhere every month and write a handful of stories from that place, which means dozens of dozens of interviews of people who go into my stories.

Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, has personally funneled over 100 million into a pair of secretive startups looking to revolutionize personal transport by developing flying cars, according to a new report from Bloomberg Businessweek. The report claims Page is backing the secretive Zee.Aero, a company that was initially set up six years ago and three years later, moved across the road from Google's huge headquarters in Mountain View. At the time, the company was reported to be working on a flying car -- based on a patent filing -- but little was known about Zee.Aero and who was backing it. The original patent filed by Zee.Aero for a flying car design. The report, based on information from 10 people familiar with the company's plans, including former employees, says Page initially lived in an apartment above the company's offices, but as it expanded, he had to move out.

Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.