A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

IMAGE: Researchers collect information for the design of PAWS in a protected area for a trial patrol. A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction.

Patent trolls are a big enough problem that they've attracted the attention of the White House, but there's little consensus on how to stop them. A new tool from artist and engineer Alexander Reben looks to algorithms for help. Patent trolls are companies that buy up patents with the primary goal of pursuing infringement claims in court, while doing little or no technology development of their own. The practice has been a particularly big problem in the world of software, but Reben -- a graduate of the MIT Media Lab -- has developed a system he thinks could help. Tapping the concept of prior art -- which is simply evidence that an invention is not original, putting a damper on its patentability -- Reben's All Prior Art project mines text from the entire public database of U.S.-issued and published patents.

Many young college graduates find the working world to be a scary place. That goes double in light of recent technological changes. As computers take over customer service, filing and other tasks associated with entry-level jobs, young people today may find it harder to gain a foothold. And in the long term, experts from Oxford University professors to Yale economist and Nobel laureate Robert Schiller have warned that automation and artificial intelligence could make many professions obsolete. That's not exactly the stuff of inspiration for young people who are at the very beginning of their careers.

For some years now, the most satisfyingly passive-aggressive way of responding to a factual query on social media has been to reply with a link from the website "Let Me Google That For You". On opening the link, your pesterer sees an animation of their exact query being typed into the Google search field, the "I'm feeling lucky" box being clicked and a page showing what is almost certainly the answer to their question. It is a sadistically elaborate vehicle for a simple message: you are wasting both our time by asking a person something, when you could ask a search engine. But the search engine is hardly infallible. It is commonly assumed these days that all useful information is on the internet, but it isn't.

When the draft version of a federal encryption bill got leaked this month, the verdict in the tech community was unanimous. Critics called it ludicrous and technically illiterate--and these were the kinder assessments of the "Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016," proposed legislation authored by the offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr. The encryption issue is complex and the stakes are high, as evidenced by the recent battle between Apple and the FBI. Many other technology issues that the country is grappling with these days are just as complex, controversial, and critical--witness the debates over law enforcement's use of stingrays to track mobile phones or the growing concerns around drones, self-driving cars, and 3-D printing. Yet decisions about these technical issues are being handled by luddite lawmakers who sometimes boast about not owning a cell phone or never having sent an email.

PROVO, Utah – Madeline MacDonald says she was an 18-year-old freshman at Brigham Young University when she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an online dating site. She reported the crime to the school's Title IX office. That same day, she says, BYU's honor code office received a copy of the report, triggering an investigation into whether MacDonald had violated the Mormon school's strict code of behavior, which bans premarital sex and drinking, among other things. Now MacDonald is among many students and others, including a Utah prosecutor, who are questioning BYU's practice of investigating accusers, saying it could discourage women from reporting sexual violence and hinder criminal cases. Some have started an online petition drive calling on the university to give victims immunity from honor code violations committed in the lead-up to a sexual assault.

Norwegian authorities have violated the human rights of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik by holding him in solitary confinement in a three-cell complex where he can play video games, watch TV and exercise, a court in Oslo ruled Wednesday. In the surprise decision, the Oslo district court said the isolation that Breivik faces in prison for killing 77 people in a bomb-and-gun massacre in 2011 is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. "The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society," the court said. "This applies no matter what -- also in the treatment of terrorists and killers." The court ordered the government to pay Breivik's legal costs of 331,000 kroner, about 41,000.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are everywhere these days. We've seen human resources software makers employing AI to help managers optimize employee satisfaction. We've seen healthcare and financial services companies considering the use of robots to find clinical trial patients and detect instances of insider trading, respectively. We've even seen chatbots spewing hate speech on Twitter. Now the online contract review platform LawGeex is pioneering the use of AI to evaluate business contracts.

Norwegian authorities have violated mass killer Anders Behring Breivik's human rights by holding him in solitary confinement in a three-cell complex where he can play video games, watch TV and exercise, a court in Oslo ruled Wednesday. In a written decision, the Oslo district court said Breivik's solitary confinement for killing 77 people in 2011 bomb-and-gun massacres breached the European Convention on Human Rights' ban on inhuman treatment. "The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society," the court said. "This applies no matter what -- also in the treatment of terrorists and killers." The court ordered the government to pay Breivik's legal costs of 331,000 kroner, about 41,000.