It is a tide that never recedes. Day by day, year on year it grows. Estimates are currently at trillions of pieces and counting, with over 60% of the oceans being heavily contaminated with plastics. With each piece of plastic taking over 400 years to degrade, our oceans, all marine life, and even our own health and livelihoods are in real danger of drowning. We see evidence of the plastic tide on all our beaches and coastlines by ever growing amounts, with small plastic pieces increasing 2.5 fold in the last decade.

It was an epic date to witness--Wednesday, October 21st, 2015--Marty McFly and Emmett "Doc" Brown arriving in a time-traveling DeLorean from 1985. At least, that's what happens in Back to the Future: Part II, which debuted in theaters 26 years ago. In the movie, Michael J. Fox's iconic character, Marty, steps out of the time machine and into a futuristic 2015 filled with flying cars, hoverboards, self-drying jackets, and power-lacing Nikes. From the perspective of the real 2015, most of the things depicted in the movie's fanciful future still seem delightfully implausible. But one thing the film did get right is the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in 2015 as a customer service tool.

PR Content Social Search – With Trump's first full month in office behind us, we look at the rise of fake news and why mainstream media needs an urgent PR reboot; learn more about how to accurately measure top of funnel content engagement; and discover the latest trends on voice activated search and its impact on SEO best practice. Fake news and PR: why mainstream media needs an urgent reboot The rise of fake news – the practice of disseminating authentically packaged but false information in the expectation that it will be virally shared online – should be viewed with more than a sense of passing scepticism. According to The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017, released last month, levels of faith in traditional media have fallen, down 5% from 48% to 43% in just one year. Add to that, the increasing numbers according to a report by Reuters who turn to sites such as Facebook (1.13 billion daily active users) for their daily news, and we face the possibility of a misinformed decision-making majority with disastrous consequences for the nation, or world, at large. Some would argue that is already happening.

"Dimension 404" has been compared to "Black Mirror," but it seems the two shows may have more differences than similarities. "Dimension 404" and "Black Mirror" were both inspired by "The Twilight Zone," and they both tackle issues related to technology. For this reason, the two shows have been compared to each other, but they have a distinct difference. For one, Hulu's new science fiction drama is not as dark as Netflix's show. "Dimension 404" aims to give a lighter take on the science-fiction-horror genre.

We are excited to announce our new RL Tuner algorithm, a method for enchancing the performance of an LSTM trained on data using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We create an RL reward function that teaches the model to follow certain rules, while still allowing it to retain information learned from data. We use RL Tuner to teach concepts of music theory to an LSTM trained to generate melodies. When I joined Magenta as an intern this summer, the team was hard at work on developing better ways to train Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to generate sequences of notes. As you may remember from previous posts, these models typically consist of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on monophonic melodies. This means that melodies are fed into the network one note at a time, and it is trained to predict the next note in the sequence.

Scared and confused – how consumers feel about the impending AI revolution. Government and industry are rushing to develop, deploy and adopt AI, with talk of robots taking over the world firmly regarded as tongue-in-cheek and the stuff of Hollywood movies. However, a new study has revealed that some robot fears are very much a reality among consumers, with these fears causing consumers to shy away from using AI-based technology. The Pegasystems survey of 6,000 customers across six countries found that close to three quarters (68%) of Brits express some sort of fear about AI, with almost one quarter (23%) worried about robots taking over the world. Further findings revealed the potential impact of these deep-rooted fears on businesses, with less than one in three (28%) of British consumers comfortable with businesses using AI to engage with them.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick has just been treated to an upgrade, pushing the best cheap streaming device on the market even further ahead of the competition. It was launched in the US some time ago, but has only just come to the UK, and brings with it a number of improvements that make it well worth buying, even if you already own an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Its headline feature is support for Alexa, Amazon's excellent voice assistant. This doesn't just enable users to track down TV shows, films and apps much, much faster than ever just by speaking to the voice-controlled remote, but also to accurately control playback without having to fiddle with any buttons. 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.

Canon is arguably the biggest name in photography, but the Japanese company has managed to stay out of the aerial photography game so far. That's about to change with the extremely pricey (and very elegantly named) PD6E2000-AW-CJ1 six-rotor drone, designed to carry the company's ultra high-end ME20F-SH camera into search and rescue situations. The drone platform doesn't look too different from existing pro-level equipment like DJI's modular M600 system, but it does offer the incredibly high 4 million ISO that makes the ME20F-SH the perfect camera for extremely dark situations. The drone is weather proof and the two-axis gimbal can carry up to 10 kilograms, but other than that the main selling point seems to be the camera it carries. That kind of light sensitivity doesn't come cheap though: according to Canon Rumors, the drone costs a whopping $20,000, which reportedly does not include the $20,000 price tag on the camera itself.

When the trailer dropped for Hulu's new series Dimension 404, made by web content studio RocketJump, you could have been forgiven for picking up a very Black Mirror vibe. Like Black Mirror, Dimension 404 is a science-fiction anthology series with a new story every episode. Each story features some kind of technology gone wrong (the 404, of course, refers to the error code when a web page is not found). Turns out they were also wrong. SEE ALSO: 'Black Mirror' is back, and your nightmares will never be the same Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's UK-born hit, which moved to Netflix for its third season last year, goes out of its way to disturb you.

You many not be a star, but you could look just like one. Scientists have created celebrity-spotting software which uses artificial intelligence to match faces to celebrities in a matter of seconds. Named Clarifai, you can test it out for yourself here - and the results may surprise you. Which one is a Jersey Shore star? The AI matched science reporter Tim Collins (left) with American television personality Ronnie Ortiz-Magro who stars in Jersey Shore (right).