Iran's Revolutionary Guard unveiled a new attack drone which is similar to a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle captured five years ago and is capable of carrying bombs, state media reported on Saturday. The drone, called the "Saegheh," or Thunderbolt, was unveiled at an expo showcasing the latest achievements by the Revolutionary Guard. This photo released on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, shows a new attack drone called Saegheh or Thunderbolt in an undisclosed location in Iran. "This long-range drone is capable of hitting four targets with smart precision-guided bombs with high accuracy," the head of the Revolutionary Guards' aerospace arm, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA, Reuters reported. The semi-official Tasnim news agency said the drone is similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone used by the U.S. Iran's state-run Press TV said the long-range drone can carry four precision-guided bombs.

Popular literature is replete with scary renditions of Artificial Intelligence. Numerous articles, stories, and novels depict an Eeeeeeeevil AI taking over the world to the detriment of humanity. . From my perspective it appears that all of HollyWeird and most of the legacy publishers to include the Hugo wanna-bes have bought into this meme. The world is doomed if we let the evil machine overlords take over. . I suggest that we have been in a war with a form of artificial intelligence since shortly after the Agricultural Revolution. .

My name is Josh Pause, and I'm trying to build a machine that can think. Have you ever stopped to ponder just how deliciously absurd that idea is? As a matter of fact, I'm not sure which is more absurd to me: a machine that can think, or, the fact that everyone around me assumes that this machine is both inevitable and destined to rise up and destroy us. These naysayers would have me believe that I am some sort of mad scientist, foolishly chasing my own blind ambitions towards the detriment of mankind. They would have me doubt my own intuition, my own instincts, and my own internal definitions of right and wrong. While we're on the subject of Stanley Kubrick, here's a fun bit of widely-believed trivia: In the late 1960s, NASA went to Stanley Kubrick for help in staging a fake moon landing.

There's a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week. Times staff writer Chris Barton offers his take on what's up and what's down in music, movies, television and just about anything else out there that is worth considering. The Westerlies: How does a four-piece trumpet and trombone instrumental combo earn raves from both indie-leaning music blogs and public radio while also performing at the Newport Jazz Festival and local rock clubs? The answer can be heard in the sprawling self-titled album due Oct. 7. Over two discs the New York City-based, Seattle-born brass band occupies a lively territory between jazz, Steven Foster-styled folk and chamber music with bracing melodies and, crucially, an undeniable sense of fun.

The military already has small drones, ranging from the palm-sized Black Hornet to the hand-tossed Raven. But these are either, in the case of the Black Hornet, mostly the domain of Special Forces, or like the Raven, kept at the Company level, and neither of these drones are cheap. Ravens cost at least 250,000 a system, when set up to military specifications. Yet drones, especially ones deployed at the squad level, don't have to be expensive. Commercial quadcopters and toy drones have seen use in the Ukrainian civil war, and there, soldiers trying to shoot them down with rifles.

Russia has warned the United States against carrying out any attacks on Syrian government forces, saying it would have repercussions across the Middle East. Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that a U.S. intervention against the Syrian army "will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole." She says regime change in Syria would create a vacuum that would be "quickly filled" by "terrorists of all stripes." U.S.-Russian tensions over Syria have escalated since the breakdown of a cease-fire last month, with each side blaming the other for its failure. Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes have launched a major onslaught on rebel-held parts of the northern city of Aleppo.

Since its inception in the late 50s, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the US Department of Defense, has funded multiple research and development projects to come up with sophisticated technology for the military. Their current goal is to invest in IoT and artificial intelligence to keep "warfighters informed as they never have been before," DARPA said. By investing in IoT and artificial intelligence, DARPA wants to build better weapons and spying mechanisms to improve war tactics and performance. The new sensors and electromagnetic systems will allow the US military to hack into enemy devices and communication systems to collect and analyze data. As GPS can occasionally prove unreliable, DARPA has also been looking into developing new tracking technology, superior and more reliable than current GPS.

With Congress opening the way for Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, victims' families are focusing on an unproven theory that a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles and a Saudi intelligence operative in San Diego directly assisted two of the 19 hijackers. The alleged Southern California connection is the key to showing that Saudi Arabia financed Muslim extremists who played a direct role in supporting some of the hijackers, according to lawyers for the families of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The families contend that lower-level Saudi operatives in Southern California helped find housing for the two hijackers, both Saudi citizens, months before they muscled their way into the cockpit of an American Airlines passenger jet that smashed into the north side of the Pentagon. If a pending lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the families hope to find the evidence in thousands of classified FBI, CIA and Treasury Department documents that could be made public as part of discovery in federal court. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any direct or indirect support for Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks, or any foreknowledge or involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

NASA may be known for sending men to the moon, establishing the International Space Station, and planning for a base on Mars--but apart from astronauts, its best known spokesmen aren't men at all--they're robots. Rovers like Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, and landers like Viking and Philae, make the perfect ambassadors into hostile, freezing, and nearly airless environments. Not only do these explorers bring back valuable scientific data from Earth's planetary neighbors, they also make perfect showcases for practical robotics. Venus is no one's idea of a vacation home. Its atmosphere is a mixture of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide, and with a surface temperature of 863 degrees Fahrenheit, only the toughest machine could possibly survive on its surface.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – If SpaceX founder Elon Musk's plan to establish a city on Mars sounds like science fiction, then consider the name of his first passenger ship. The answer lies in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the humorous series about the travels and travails of Earth's last surviving man. Musk is leaning toward the name Heart of Gold, the novels' starship with the Infinite Improbability Drive. "I like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability," Musk said in presenting his long-awaited Mars colonization plan this past week, "because I think our ship is also extremely improbable." "But the acronym is not the best," he chuckled.