Nataliia Dmytriievska was 15 years old and enveloped by flames when she first heard the call of outer space. A year earlier her boyfriend had taught her the basics of poi, a Maori dance in which performers swing flaming, tethered weights to describe bright geometric shapes in the dark. Despite the burns and bruises she earned, Dmytriievska was a determined pupil. She would practice for hours each day, drawing flowers and other outlines around her body using dummy weights, before attempting the same perilous tricks using fire. Although money was never the primary motivation – "I simply love the fire; there is something magical when you feel like it's in your control," she said – after a few years Dmytriievska turned semi-professional. She joined a circus troupe in her home city of Kiev, Ukraine to help support her university studies. In June 2007, the troupe began rehearsals for an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven. As the backing music sounded out for the first time – a pipe organ, played rhythmically, as if calling people to worship, soon joined by galloping guitars and a furious drumbeat – Dmytriievska took to the stage. But her mind was not on the performance. As soon as she finished the routine she left the stage, walked up to her friend on the mixing desk and asked: "Where is that music from?" Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back. The track, he said, came from Eve Online, a science-fiction video game. It is, he explained, a game set in a vast galaxy comprised of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from around the world, who explore and do battle together daily via the internet.

That fake news and misinformation on Facebook could have influenced the outcome of the US presidential election is worrying (Opinion, 15 November), but, in reality, this is only tinkering around the edges of a major problem. The first amendment of the US constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press. However, for the most part, the supreme court has failed to use it to rule on libel cases: hence tabloids such as the National Enquirer can get away with printing pretty much anything they like. It is possible to police the publishing and broadcasting industry – if nations are willing to do it. Sufficient staff (not robots) need to be employed to fact-check before publishing or broadcasting.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

Drones have always been flying robots, but all those smarts haven't stopped them from flying backwards into trees, walls and people. The new DJI Phantom 4 Pro won't do that. This is DJI's first drone with 360-degree awareness thanks to six collision-avoidance systems arrayed around its body. With them, the quadcopter builds a 3D map of obstacles behind, in front and below. The company unveiled the new Phantom drone aimed at prosumers as well as a new pro-level drone, the Inspire 2, on Tuesday at an event in Los Angeles.

President-elect Donald Trump will be able to employ deadly drone strikes largely at his discretion if current guidelines remain in place. And President Barack Obama has no plans to change those rules before he leaves office, the Guardian reported Tuesday. The next president will inherit the so-called drones "playbook" created by the Obama administration in 2013 that dictated policy on drone strikes, the president's main way of striking against terrorism. Since drone usage began under the administration of President George W. Bush, thousands of people have been killed through the targeted strikes from unmanned aircraft and many nations across the globe consider the standards the U.S. applies for drone strikes to be too secretive. "Maybe on the left no one would believe that Trump has a steady hand, but Obama has normalized the idea that presidents get to have secret large-scale killing programs at their disposal," Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA told the Guardian.

Google is finally going ahead with its plans to build a "landscraper" headquarters in London's King's Cross, more than three years after the project was first announced. The development, which will be Google's UK headquarters, was reportedly thrown into turmoil in 2015 when bosses in California threw out the original plans, by London-based architects AHMM, for being "too boring", and brought in a Thomas Heatherwick, designer of a new London bus, the Olympic cauldron, and the Garden Bridge. Further questions were raised in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union about whether or not the search engine would want to base up to 7,000 employees in London. But in a speech on Tuesday at Google's current campus in King's Cross, chief executive Sundar Pichai confirmed the plans were going ahead. "Here in the UK, it's clear to me that computer science has a great future with the talent, educational institutions, and passion for innovation we see all around us," he said.

Companies, and some governments, pay BrandsEye to alert them to significant swings in sentiment to put out fires and identify opportunities. Starting in July 2016, their machines used artificial intelligence (AI) to pull messages from social media feeds relevant to the US presidential campaign, primarily mentions of Hillary Clinton or Trump. BrandsEye then put the word out to crowdsource human analysis of individual messages. "We use people for what people are good at and machines for what machines are great at. And by using that interplay between the two, we are able to measure sentiment very deeply and by using computers we measure very deeply," says Kloppers. While AI is great for pulling in vast amounts of relevant data, it still struggles with sarcasm, innuendo and colloquial language.

IBM captured our imaginations when it unveiled Watson, the artificial intelligence computer capable of playing--and winning--the "Jeopardy" game show. Since then, Big Blue has been introducing Watson's analytics and learning capabilities across various industries, including health care and information security. Cognitive security technology such as Watson for Cybersecurity can change how information security professionals defend against attacks by helping them digest vast amounts of data. IBM Security is currently in the middle of a year-long research project working with eight universities to help train Watson to tackle cybercrime. Watson has to learn the "language of cybersecurity" to understand what a threat is, what it does, and what indicators are related.

Is Spotify damaging your hard drive? A bug that could harm... Can your tweets reveal your gender? Study exposes inaccurate... Millions of devastated Tinder users are forced to spend a... Google's self-driving cars can now perform tricky... Is Spotify damaging your hard drive? A bug that could harm... Can your tweets reveal your gender? Study exposes inaccurate... Millions of devastated Tinder users are forced to spend a... Google's self-driving cars can now perform tricky...

Can your tweets reveal your gender? Study exposes inaccurate... Is Spotify damaging your hard drive? A bug that could harm... Millions of devastated Tinder users are forced to spend a... Google's self-driving cars can now perform tricky... Can your tweets reveal your gender? Study exposes inaccurate... Is Spotify damaging your hard drive? A bug that could harm... Millions of devastated Tinder users are forced to spend a... Google's self-driving cars can now perform tricky...