Capturing snowflakes on film can be quite the feat, as photographers have mere before the tiny ice crystal's intricate details melt – but a new video shows the event in reverse. Photographer Jens recently shared a stunning video showing already melted snowflakes freezing back to their original form. Each shot begins with a small droplet of water that begins to sprout icicles until it returns to the unique design. The movie was done using highly detailed macro photography, which is capable of making very small object look larger than life size. Capturing snowflakes on film can be quite the feat, as photographers have mere before the tiny ice crystal's intricate details melt – but a new video shows the event in reverse.

On a cold December night in 1950, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy spent a charity dinner at Washington's Sulgrave Club trading insults with liberal journalist Drew Pearson. McCarthy had attacked Pearson on the floor of the Senate, calling for a boycott of his radio show. Pearson had attacked McCarthy on air and in his newspaper column, accusing the senator of lying about communist infiltration of the American government. McCarthy had recklessly accused the State Department of harboring hundreds of communists, sparking a massive investigation and an ongoing purge. After dinner, the two ran into each other in the cloakroom and their conflict turned physical.

This essay first appeared in our "Home" issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today. Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly half a century ago. For Bullock, home is (as it was for Dullea) the Earth, looming below so huge it would seem she couldn't miss it, if she could somehow just fall from her shattered spacecraft. She cares about nothing more than getting back to where she came from, even as 2001's Dullea is in flight, accepting his exile and even embracing it.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in understanding users' online content consumption patterns. But, the unstructured, high-dimensional, and dynamic nature of such data makes extracting valuable insights challenging. Here we propose a model that combines the simplicity of matrix factorization with the flexibility of neural networks to efficiently extract nonlinear patterns from massive text data collections relevant to consumers' online consumption patterns. Our model decomposes a user's content consumption journey into nonlinear user and content factors that are used to model their dynamic interests. This natural decomposition allows us to summarize each user's content consumption journey with a dynamic probabilistic weighting over a set of underlying content attributes. The model is fast to estimate, easy to interpret and can harness external data sources as an empirical prior. These advantages make our method well suited to the challenges posed by modern datasets. We use our model to understand the dynamic news consumption interests of Boston Globe readers over five years. Thorough qualitative studies, including a crowdsourced evaluation, highlight our model's ability to accurately identify nuanced and coherent consumption patterns. These results are supported by our model's superior and robust predictive performance over several competitive baseline methods.

With two marquee names cast, the show will continue to center on Joel and Ellie, and is expected to retell the story of the first game, released in 2013. This may give the showrunners some creative leeway. Video games are sometimes described as telling the parts of a movie that would be skipped, like traveling a few miles to the destination just to get to the next story beat. A TV show isn't hamstrung by any obligation to gameplay. Luckily, the first game had plenty of time pass between its chapters, so there's ripe opportunity to tell stories the games didn't -- or couldn't.

The listing of Bumble, which also owns Badoo, makes a billionaire of 31-year-old founder Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Creating a movie trailer takes time, and most broadcasters and streaming platforms don't have enough resources to do it. Their creative team, responsible for putting together promotional material for digital and social media, spends very little time being creative. To produce a 30" rough edit for a 10-movie stunt is about 5 days of viewing and logging. They also use and manage external agencies, leading to bottlenecks where one department's output is heavily prioritized over another's. The whole process is onerous, time consuming, and inefficient. PromoMii, a UK startup, solves this problem with a unique blend of domain expertise and machine learning (ML). Their product Nova provides functionality to search for scenes or specific dialogues across their library. Productivity is supercharged with template queries, enabling creatives to finish their spot in minutes in terms of days. Nordic Entertainment Group, one of PromoMii's customers, found that it was 10 times cheaper and 20 times faster to create trailers with Nova. A promotion which would usually take two days to produce was completed within 2 hours. This blog post is the first in a series of startup ML stories, where we tell stories like PromoMii's in terms of three crucial ingredients to building a successful business with ML – team, product, and partnership. PromoMii was founded by two Danes from Copenhagen to help large broadcasters promote their shows. Over time and working backwards from their customers, the company pivoted toward using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable creatives to be creative. The technological challenge inspired Tigran Mnatskanyan, CTO, to join PromoMii with a mission of building a great engineering team and crafting the content creation platform of the future. In terms of domain expertise, PromoMii's Chairman is Lester Mordue, an award-winning creative director bringing experience from MTV, Sky, Disney, and Discovery. As a creative himself, Lester immediately saw the benefits of Nova and is in a unique position to open doors for the business and provide guidance on product-market fit. "In my career, I've sat in boardrooms looking at tech and marketing ROI as well as sitting in edit suites looking for inspiration and story hooks," said Lester. "Viewers enjoy on-demand services and streaming platforms, and so too should marketeers who help make viewing decisions.

SYDNEY-- Microsoft Corp. said the U.S. should copy Australia's controversial proposal that tech companies pay newspapers for content--putting it at odds with Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. It isn't the first time Microsoft has stepped into feuds involving rivals--particularly in areas where they have an edge. Its Bing search engine lags behind Google in market share. Microsoft has urged governments to better regulate facial-recognition technology and last year sided with a videogame developer against Apple Inc. in a dispute about app-store fees. The Australian proposal, if enacted into law--it is now before a parliamentary committee--could prompt other countries to follow suit in a global transformation of the relationship between tech companies and traditional media.

The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They've alleged that algorithms can unearth the secret formulas of fiction and film. That Bayesian software can map the plots of memoirs and comic books. That digital brains can pen primitive lyrics1 and short stories--wooden and weird, to be sure, yet evidence that computers are capable of more. But the hoax is not harmless. If it were possible to build a digital novelist or poetry analyst, then computers would be far more powerful than they are now. They would in fact be the most powerful beings in the history of Earth. Their power would be the power of literature, which although it seems now, in today's glittering silicon age, to be a rather unimpressive old thing, springs from the same neural root that enables human brains to create, to imagine, to dream up tomorrows.

Game of Thrones actors Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal – who also stars in Disney's Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian – have been cast in HBO's television adaptation of blockbusting video game series The Last of Us. They will take on the roles of Ellie and Joel in the forthcoming drama. The Hollywood Reporter broke news of the adaptation last March, and since then speculation over the casting has been rife. Fans on social media initially favoured Booksmart star Kaitlyn Dever for the role of Ellie, and the actor expressed interest. Meanwhile, True Detective's Mahershala Ali was rumoured to have been approached for the role of Joel.