"Hidden Figures," a movie about three African-American women pioneers at NASA, was slated for worldwide release Friday. The story of the women who calculated flight trajectories that helped John Glenn become the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth previously opened in a limited release on Christmas. The film, which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 91 percent and will expand to 2,300 theaters Friday, is a historical comedy-drama based on a nonfiction book published by Margot Lee Shetterly in 2016. The characters' work with NASA aided in the launch of Project Mercury in the late 50s and early 60s, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight. Some who have watched the film said it accurately portrayed what happened in history, like Johnson, who said it "sounded very, very accurate" after watching the film's advance screening in November.

Courtesy of Funimation, the Mamoru Oshii directed Ghost in the Shell anime movie from 1995 will be briefly coming back to movie theaters at the start of February. Launched in select U.S. theaters on February 7th and 8th, if you are at all a fan of the movie then you really need to see this on the big screen. The choice of Mamoru Oshii and his team back in the 90's to adapt Masamune Shirow's manga of Ghost in the Shell was definitely an interesting one. However, after intricate and subtle films like Patlabor 2, having the same team come up with a modern tale of cyberpunk intrigue made a good deal of sense. Due to the nature of film, much of the exposition in the manga had to be skipped, specifically that of the artificially intelligent Fuchikomas.

A machine learning system turns poetry into song by composing a pop music score to suit the lyrics it's given. "I was studying singing while I was doing my PhD in computer science," says Margareta Ackerman at San Jose State University in California, who developed the system with David Loker at technology advisory firm Orbitwerks. "Over time, I started to think of computers as creative partners instead of tools, which could maybe help me write songs." The system, called ALYSIA, processes short lines of text and associates each syllable with a musical note. It chooses the pairing based on features including the syllable's position in the word and how it will fit with the previous five notes.

Q: I got Amazon Echo for Christmas. It tells me the weather and plays music. What else can it do? It seems like a waste of money to me. A: At its core, Amazon's Echo is a Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands.

Amazon customers have been warned they could lose hundreds of pounds if they fall for a "convincing" fake email scam. Action Fraud, the UK's fraud and cyber-crime centre, said the spoofed emails from "service@amazon.co.uk" claims recipients have made an order online and mimic an automatic customer email notification. The number of people who have been sent the fake email is unclear, however Action Fraud said it had received several reports about the scam. The email claims shoppers have ordered products including an expensive vintage chandelier, Boses stereos, iPhone's and luxury watches. In order to get a shopper's financial information, the email cleverly states that if the recipient didn't authorised the transaction they can click on the help centre link to receive a full refund.

It is, of course, wise and beneficial to peer ahead for potential dangers and problems -- one of the central tasks of high-end science fiction. Alas, detecting that a danger lurks is easier than prescribing solutions to prevent it. Take the plausibility of malignant Artificial Intelligence, remarked-upon recently by luminaries ranging from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk to Francis Fukuyama (Our Post-Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution). Some warn that the arrival of sapient, or super- sapient machinery may bring an end to our species – or at least its relevance on the cosmic stage – a potentiality evoked in many a lurid Hollywood film. Nick Bostrom takes an in-depth look at the future of augmented human and a revolution in machine intelligence in his recent book -- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies -- charting possible hazards, failure modes and spectacular benefits as machines match and then exceed our human levels of intelligence. Taking middle ground, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with Y-Combinator founder Sam Altman to establish Open AI, an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research – and its products – accountable by maximizing transparency and accountability.

Our aim is to demonstrate the capabilities of modern computer vision and graphics technology, and convey it in an approachable and fun way. We want to emphasize that computer-generated videos have been part in feature-film movies for over 30 years. Virtually every high-end movie production contains a significant percentage of synthetically-generated content (from Lord of the Rings to Benjamin Button). These results are hard to distinguish from reality and it often goes unnoticed that the content is not real. The novelty and contribution of our work is that we can edit pre-recorded videos in real-time on a commodity PC.

Okay, here's a weird one: Chinese drone manufacturer DJI has reportedly bought a majority stake in famous camera brand Hasselblad. The news comes from TechCrunch and photography website Luminous Landscape, both claiming inside sources have confirmed the as-yet unannounced deal. Details are beyond sketchy, since neither company has spoken to journalists to confirm or deny the transaction so far. The story, as Luminous Landscape tells it, is that Hasselblad was finally coming out of its death slide with the launch of the new X1D mirrorless compact camera. But producing the device was too costly for the cash-strapped business, and the venture firm that bought it in 2011 was unwilling to put in more capital.

"At Altek, we are constantly striving to enhance our digital image solutions and set the direction for the future of smarter imaging devices," said Jason Lin, General Manager and Corporate Senior Vice President of Altek. "CEVA's imaging and vision DSP provides the platform which allows us to further enhance the image quality of our solutions and push the boundaries of what a camera can do using artificial intelligence and advanced vision algorithms." "Altek is a proven leader in imaging, with a strong track record in the smartphone space and we are excited to work with them," said, Ilan Yona, vice president and general manager of CEVA's Vision Business Unit. "The combination of Altek's advanced imaging technologies along with our DSP-based vision and machine learning offering creates one of the most intelligent digital imaging solutions on the market today." CEVA's latest generation imaging and vision DSP platforms address the extreme processing requirements and low power constraints of the most sophisticated machine learning and machine vision applications used in smartphones, surveillance, augmented reality, sense and avoid drones and self-driving cars.

The Season 12 premiere finally answered questions about Zack (Eric Millegan) and revealed the identity of The Puppeteer. Now, the Jeffersonian can get back to solving grisly murders every week. In Season 12, episode 2, the team will have an interesting case in their hands. According to the synopsis (via SpoilerTV), the FBI discovers the body of man who created artificial intelligence. The promo reveals that the crime scene is teeming with evidence.