Iran concluded a major, three-day military exercise Friday intended to review the readiness of its armed forces. The drills, called "Great Prophet," also field-tested new military technology, including the Iranian-made Karrar tank and the Hamasseh drone, Middle East Monitor reported. The Iranian air force, elite units and local forces were involved in the exercise. The drills covered four provinces in Iran's southeast region near the border with Pakistan. The exercises came amid growing tensions in the area over the protracted civil war in Syria and the threat posed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

A patient walks into the emergency department at Rush University Medical Center with a fever and bloodshot eyes. In days of yore, doctors would have to exhaust the obvious possibilities -- like a flu or allergic reaction -- before finally figuring a patient was suffering from Zika virus. But Rush says its predictive software, a system called Guardian, helps alert doctors to a possible diagnosis hours faster than physicians normally would. When dealing with more rare diagnoses, doctors typically think, "it's going to be everything else besides smallpox," said Dr. Dino Rumoro, who's been working on the technology for more than 20 years and is the chairman of Rush's Department of Emergency Medicine. "This gives the clinician a crutch."

Yemeni government troops newly-trained by a Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Shiite rebels routed al-Qaida militants on Friday from a city in the country's south, military officials said. Houta, the capital of Lahj province, is now firmly under government control, the officials said. The coalition-trained troops, which are loyal to Yemen's internationally recognized government, were based in the southern Al-Anad base from where they launched the fight to retake the provincial capital, they added. The officials said the militants fled on Friday from Houta to nearby towns and farmland. The assault came at a time the coalition helicopters and U.S. drones have waged series of airstrikes targeting al-Qaida hideouts and strongholds across Yemen's southern region.

Alex Gianturco was a successful corporate lawyer based in Washington, D.C. Then, in 2011, he gave up his day job at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and focused all his efforts on his other passion: being a space pirate. Known as The Mittani within the virtual world of "Eve Online," Gianturco commands an army of 40,000 space pilots loyal to his Imperium coalition. He has a trusted band of lieutenants and uses propaganda, espionage and deception to retain his position as the game's most powerful player, describing himself as the Vladimir Putin of the "Eve" universe. He has even leveraged his position to earn a living from "Eve Online," setting up his own website and even renting out his army of mercenaries to other video games.

The government plans to propose basic rules for the research and development of artificial intelligence at a Group of Seven meeting of ministers in charge of information and communication technology later this month, sources said Friday. The envisioned proposal is expected to seek the establishment of eight principles, including the importance of respecting human dignity and protecting privacy when developing computer science that gives machines humanlike intelligence. Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi is expected to present the eight principles at the two-day G-7 meeting starting on April 29 in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, and call for deeper discussions involving international organizations such as the OECD. Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where Google's AI program AlphaGo was recently able to defeat a Go grandmaster for the first time. AI technologies are expected to generate an economic return of around 121 trillion in Japan by 2045, according to an estimate that the government plans to present to the G-7 meeting.

Mauro Maggioni has been named the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Data Intensive Computation at Johns Hopkins in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Mathematics and the Whiting School of Engineering's Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. He will join Johns Hopkins from Duke University, where in 2012 he was promoted from assistant professor to full professor of mathematics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Maggioni is the 20th Bloomberg Distinguished Professor appointed across Johns Hopkins. The professorships are supported by a 350 million gift to the university by Johns Hopkins alumnus, philanthropist, and three-term New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The majority of this gift is dedicated to creating 50 new interdisciplinary professorships, galvanizing people, resources, research, and educational opportunities to address major world problems.

The simple machines are explosives with triggers, set in the ground primed and ready for someone to set them off. For humans, war does, and the landmines that once marked the front line between warring factions can change instead to deadly artifacts, a lethal trap for anyone who wanders unknowingly into danger. Getting rid of landmines is a humanitarian concern. To solve it, scientists from the University of Bristol are enlisting the help of drones. One of the major dangers with landmines is that, while they're waiting in the ground to blow up, the vegetation around them isn't, and after a few seasons, plants can grow over the bombs, hiding them from human eyes. But there are other ways to detect them, says John Day of Bristol's School of Physics: Living plants have a very distinctive reflection in the near infrared spectrum, just beyond human vision, which makes it possible to tell how healthy they are.

When viewed on a cosmic scale, humanity lives on a tiny grain of sand floating in an unimaginably-deep ocean. Huge expanses of space separate even the closest stars, ensuring that, should any sufficiently intelligent life form want to spread across the galaxy, it would take a momentous effort to launch across the interstellar seas. As we look toward the stars, hoping that we may visit them some day, many would argue that interstellar travel is impossible. After all, the nearest-known star system is over 4 light-years away. Let's think about that for a moment: It takes light 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun's surface to our planet's atmosphere.

"Criminal" is more violent than it needs to be, but it also has some unexpectedly involving elements. Half science-fiction tale, half espionage thriller, it's a pleasantly far-fetched endeavor that moves along so briskly that it leaves no time to consider its implausibilities, which are many. Directed by Ariel Vroman ("The Iceman") and written by Douglas Cook & David Weisberg, who scripted Michael Bay's "The Rock" back in the day, "Criminal" has a premise that's hard to wrap your head around: that the memories and feelings of one person can be implanted into another person's brain. Some high profile acting names were intrigued enough by this Frankenstein-ish notion to sign on, including Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, the once and future Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and, in a crucial but unbilled role, Ryan Reynolds. But it's Kevin Costner, the actor playing against type in the title role, who does the most to hold our interest.

The Journalism Department at Emerson College and the Emerson Engagement Lab recently invited William Li to give a talk to introduce machine learning to journalism and communications students. This is a live blog account of the talk by Catherine D'Ignazio. William Li is a 2015–2016 Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 PhD computer science graduate from MIT. He develops and applies machine learning methods to answer social science questions computationally and to promote public understanding of law, politics, and public policy. His projects include predicting the authors of unsigned Supreme Court opinions, visualizing the complexity of our laws, and discovering ideas from large collections of public comments on proposed regulations. William has also worked on recommender systems, speech recognition, and user activity prediction at Apple and Mitsubishi Electric. He did his master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, founded the MIT Assistive Technology Club, and has taught classes that involve civic collaborations with organizations such as the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Cambridge Commission for People with Disabilities. William Li introduces the topic and that he wants to make the session very interactive.