Sir David Attenborough is no stranger to VR. The beloved naturalist and TV presenter has worked on immersive, look-where-you-like films for the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, the American Museum of Natural History and Google. Now, the documentarian is teaming up with Sky and the NHM for a new experience called Hold the World, which allows you to pick up fossils and other rate objects. As you turn them over, a "hologram" of Attenborough will pop up and explain their importance. Sky is working with VR and "immersive content production studio" Factory 42 on the project, as well as Dream Reality Interactive and Talesmith.

Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business. Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force in at least five different giant industries: retail, logistics, consumer technology, cloud computing, and most recently, media and entertainment. The company has had its share of missteps -- the expensive Fire phone flop comes to mind -- but is also rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have put it ahead of competitors in promising new industries. This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the mid-2000s, and more recently the surprising consumer hit in the Echo device and its Alexa AI assistant. Today's Amazon is far more than just an "everything store," it's a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And its insatiable appetite for new markets mean competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.

Virgin Media has announced an incredibly fast new broadband tier for small- and medium-sized enterprises. Voom Fibre, which will be available from 2 May, promises download speeds of up to 350Mbps as standard. Virgin Media says that's four times faster than anything offered by its rivals. Business customers will be able to choose between three different packages, which start at £30 per month. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

"Drawing on your phone or computer can be slow and difficult -- so we created AutoDraw, a new web-based tool that pairs machine learning with drawings created by talented artists to help you draw," wrote Google Creative Lab's "creative technologist," Dan Motzenbecker, earlier this week. AutoDraw is one of Google's artificial intelligence (AI) experiments, working across platforms to let anyone, irrespective of their artistic flair, create something super quick with little more than a scribble. It guesses what you're trying to draw, then lets you pick from a list of previously created pictures. No worries!" is the general idea here. First up, AutoDraw is a super fun tool that gets increasingly addictive -- that much is clear. But what's also clear is that the tool is more a display of AI smarts than it is a tool to improve your artwork, because it would be just as easy to embody the exact same functionality within a text-based search engine. I mean, why bother drawing a crap dolphin ...

Entertainment has already been transformed by tech advances that seem custom-made to blow our minds. Whether it's amazing graphics that transport us to incredible new worlds or interactive 3-D games that feel like real life, entertainment is evolving into a more personalized, immersive experience, and the key to this engaging entertainment future is artificial intelligence. At its most simple, AI is technology that can operate and think for itself without traditional human intervention. If you have an iPhone, Siri is a great example. Without lifting a finger, you can ask Apple's digital assistant to find things for you, take a note or call your mom.

From phone support and mobile apps to ATMs and chatbots -- when it comes to customer service, banking automation has come a long way. However, the one missing piece that these automated banking features lack is a real human being to interact with during a transaction. That's something that Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based startup, is hoping to change. The company's new technological development is intended to bring back the human component to customer service without relying on actual people. To meet this goal, Soul Machines is producing artificial intelligence-powered avatars that are designed to emotionally engage with banking customers.

You're more likely to have your mother's cheekbones than her eyes, new research suggests. Researchers studied the facial features of 1,000 female twins to find parts of the face that are likely to be controlled by genetics. They used their results to create interactive face maps that reveal the features you're most likely to inherit from your parents. Biological traits such as facial features are influenced by genes and'environmental' factors including the socioeconomic conditions a person grew up in. Professor Giovanni Montana, from King's College London, said: 'The notion that our genes control our face is self-evident.

When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985, reproductive rights were under siege and acid rain was corroding the forests and rivers. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reasoned that if you took all this to its logical end, you could wind up with a theocracy, not a democracy, and a population rendered sterile by its own poisons. So her novel of speculative fiction imagined a hyper-religious nation where young women who were still fertile were rounded up and confined to the human equivalent of puppy mills, forced to bear the children of powerful men. Well, here we are in 2017, and women's rights to control their own bodies are at risk again, the environment is threatened again -- and "The Handmaid's Tale" is more popular than ever. It became a feature film in 1990, and this April 26, Hulu launches "The Handmaid's Tale" as a 10-episode series. Why is this book, like George Orwell's "1984," finding a new and large and attentive following?

Despite being in development for decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has made leaps and bounds in the past several years, largely thanks to the availability of mass amounts of data and cheap computing power. While data is a good thing for sales, processing it without the right tools can lead to information overload. Fortunately, there are now some innovative AI tools that allow businesses to leverage data for better efficiency. One exciting way companies are using AI is in their sales and marketing departments. Here are a variety of the ways in which artificial intelligence influences sales today and will do so in the future.

Wells Fargo & Company is testing a "chatbot", an automated program that can communicate with the bank's customers on Facebook's messaging platform to give them information on their accounts and help them reset their passwords. The US bank said on Tuesday that it is piloting the virtual assistant with several hundred employees, and plans to extend testing to a few thousand customers later this spring. Wells Fargo's chatbot will use artificial intelligence to respond to natural language messages from users, such as how much money they have in their accounts, and where the nearest bank ATM is. Chatbots have risen in popularity in finance and other industries over the past few months because recent improvements in artificial intelligence have made them better at interacting and interpreting human language. Banks and other financial firms are hopeful chatbots can be used to provide better and continuous customer service at a fraction of the cost of large call centres populated by humans.