Solo: A Star Wars Story stars Alden Ehrenreich as a young Han Solo, Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as droid L3-37. Meet the Millennium Falcon: The ship that made the Kessel Run to Wakanda and... wait, what? Presale tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story went on sale on Fandango at midnight Eastern Time and have already doubled presales for Marvel's blockbuster hit Black Panther in less than 24 hours. Among 2018 films, Solo's presale numbers are second only to Avengers: Infinity War. Ticket-buyers receive a free Solo poster but must pay shipping and handling charges.

Google Assistant's latest trick is ordering movie tickets. It's a partnership with Fandango that enables the digital helper to assist you with movie night decisions. You can buy tickets with your voice, or you can ask for general showtimes in your area, along with finding out a movie's cast and maybe even watching a trailer. Google says picking assigned seats is pretty simple too. It was only a matter of time before Google brought Assistant into the movie mix.

The AI revolution is quickly gaining momentum, with robots being deployed everywhere from offshore oil rigs to marine research centres. Now, a laboratory at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University is championing artificial intelligence by gradually outsourcing chemical work to robots. Armed with skill, precision and steadfast diligence, the robots lift bottles filled with chemical reagents, transport them to test tube banks and dispense an exact number of drops. The goal is to pinpoint the optimum chemical makeup for high-capacity electric car batteries, a project that's fronted by the Toyota Research Institute. While the robots are currently used only as manpower, the team assert that they could eventually devise the experiments.

In some ways, the robots of "Star Wars" are closer to humans than machines. Droids like C-3P0 and R2-D2 are capable of independent thought and spontaneous problem-solving. And they represent a future for robotics that we might achieve someday. We already see aspects of "Star Wars" robots in today's machines. They look a bit like C-3PO or get around like R2-D2.

But like the original, this "Remain in Light" represents an act of outreach. To make it, Kidjo teamed with Jeff Bhasker, an A-list American pop producer known for his work with Beyoncé and Kanye West. And there are cameos by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend and Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange -- just two of the countless young art rockers indebted to Talking Heads.

In 1998, The Truman Show told the story of a man whose life, unbeknownst to him, is a phenomenally elaborate reality television show. Every day and around the clock, every move made by the hapless Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is captured by a network of hidden cameras and broadcast live worldwide for the entertainment of millions. And then Truman begins to notice discrepancies. "Things that don't fit," he says, in the original script. Twenty years later, The Truman Show writer Andrew Niccol frequently experiences what he calls Trumanesque moments. Sloppy art direction and set design. And he doesn't mean anything happening on a set or on a screen. "There'll be a traffic jam, for instance, for no reason," Niccol says. "In my mind, the reason is actually that Christof"--the all-powerful, demiurge director of The Truman Show--"isn't ready at the next set. Or when you see someone out of context. And you realize, oh my god, that person was in the hospital scene. Today, we are all Truman, our ...

We get a vague due date for Tesla's next big project, the Model Y, Google's voice assistant makes its way into thousands more smart devices and cheaters never prosper (and possibly go to jail) when it comes to Overwatch and Fortnite. Elon Musk says it'll spark a'manufacturing revolution'. Tesla's latest prediction for Model Y's arrival is 2020 Tesla's forthcoming Model Y is still shrouded in mystery. We know it's a crossover EV, and we know it might not have mirrors... and that's about it. But CEO Elon Musk has now revealed that the company aims to bring the new vehicle to production in 2020, adding in its conference call that doing so will spark a "manufacturing revolution".

Democracy is a solid form of government, and that's why it isn't particularly exciting. It's based on laws, on an independent judiciary and the separation of powers, all of which makes the system predictable. There is broad consensus in democracies that it is in everyone's best interest to agree on a set of rules that all must live by. There isn't much room left over for personal escapades and individual acts of heroism. But cults of personality are generally incompatible. Democracy always allows room for doubt, for divergent opinions and for criticism.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Loom.ai, the provider of best-in-class mobile solutions for building and animating personalized, 3D avatars at scale, today announced a $3M seed investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The new funding will be used to fuel recruiting, additional partnerships and the continued development of its fully embedded SDK solution. "We are incredibly proud of our partnership with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. This strategic investment represents an important step in our growth as a company," said Mahesh Ramasubramanian, co-founder and CEO of Loom.ai. "We will immediately ramp up our recruitment efforts to attract the world's top talent in deep learning and computer vision to join our journey. Augmented Reality experiences built with Loom.ai's personalized 3D avatars will unlock new mediums of communication, entertainment, and e-commerce."

The modulation transfer function (MTF) is widely used to characterise the performance of optical systems. Measuring it is costly and it is thus rarely available for a given lens specimen. Instead, MTFs based on simulations or, at best, MTFs measured on other specimens of the same lens are used. Fortunately, images recorded through an optical system contain ample information about its MTF, only that it is confounded with the statistics of the images. This work presents a method to estimate the MTF of camera lens systems directly from photographs, without the need for expensive equipment. We use a custom grid display to accurately measure the point response of lenses to acquire ground truth training data. We then use the same lenses to record natural images and employ a data-driven supervised learning approach using a convolutional neural network to estimate the MTF on small image patches, aggregating the information into MTF charts over the entire field of view. It generalises to unseen lenses and can be applied for single photographs, with the performance improving if multiple photographs are available.