Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist and jazz musician.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a ton of smart capabilities, but until recently, playing music from any service other than Prime Music required telling the device which service to use each time. Now, users may have noticed an option to set Pandora or Spotify as its default music player. If you have one of the Alexa-connected devices, then you can go into its control app on the web or a mobile device and look under settings to switch the default away from Amazon. Once it's set, just talk normally to the speaker, "Amazon/Alexa play (artists/song/etc.)" and it will play from the proper service.

The winners of this year's aerial photography competition run by online site Dronestagram have been announced. The winning pictures taken using drone cameras were selected from thousands of entries by the judges, including National Geographic Deputy Director Patrick Witty and Emanuela Ascoli, photo editor of National Geographic, France. Here we present the winning images from three categories.

Washington University in Saint Louis researchers demonstrated their upgraded camera by pointing laser light onto a printout of a toy car to create a movie of the light reaching different portions of the car at different times. A new approach to high-speed photography could help capture the clearest-ever footage of light pulses, explosions or neurons firing in the brain, according to a team of ultrafast camera developers. The technique involves shooting 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure without an external light source. That means, for example, there would be no need to set off multiple explosions just to gather enough data to create a video reconstructing exactly how chemicals react to create the blast. A team of Washington University in Saint Louis researchers introduced their "single-shot compressed ultrafast photography" camera two years ago.

Apple has released the first public test version of iOS 10 and Sierra, its new MacOS software. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. The products, available as free updates, were announced at Apple's WWDC event in September. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. To sign up for Apple's beta program, simply visit the beta site.

Cover stories offer a look at the process behind the art on the cover: who made it, how it got made, and why. Editing photographs for Science is always exciting, but I had never encountered anything like the challenge of photographing the tiny transparent "ray" on the cover of this week's issue. I was fascinated to learn about this scientific achievement but worried about the cover. Photograph a tiny transparent device that moves in response to light? This was going to require creativity, problem-solving, patience, and luck.

Every year, Apple fans around the world line up to buy the newest iPhone the minute it goes on sale. But Apple's software updates for the iPhone, which the company usually reveals during its annual developer's conference, are met with far less fanfare. This is largely because Apple's new software releases, as important as they may be for keeping your iPhone fast and secure, have recently been minor upgrades. Apple's iOS 8 introduced iCloud Drive for accessing files across multiple devices and a new Health app to house fitness data from several fitness apps; iOS 9 brought Apple's streaming music service and a slightly improved version of Siri. While helpful, these additions didn't alter the overall iPhone experience in a significant way.

There are a surprising number of chatbots already available that promise something vital to all human beings: companionship. Taking inspiration from the film'Her' (pictured), they will be available to talk whenever you need to. Mitsuku is one such example. She learns by experience (the more you talk to her, the smarter she becomes) and is friendly but will argue back. Unsurprisingly, most chatbot companions available at the moment are female.

While the technology industry is abuzz with new opportunities created by advances in artificial intelligence -- from intelligent web search to voice recognition -- book publishing has yet to feel the full impact of AI. Neil Balthaser intends to change that through his machine learning software Intellogo. Intellogo uses technology that can analyze and understand the contents of a book in order to provide better book recommendations to readers. The technology can also identify reader behavior trends that can inform book publishers' content creation strategy. In the following interview, Balthaser explains how Intellogo's software can help publishers streamline book discovery and how AI will transform the reading experience into a conversation between the reader and the book.