Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now. It's becoming more prominent because technology has moved forward to such an extent that it can be viably used in the real world. This is no longer just a concept that works in the lab. It's now time to take it out into the real world. There are many uses for artificial intelligence, and one of those is games.

Google DeepMind has appointed Ben Laurie as its new head of security. Laurie announced on his Twitter page on Thursday he has joined the artificial intelligence research company -- bought by Google for a reported 400 million in 2014 -- as head of security and transparency. Laurie is the founding director of the Apache Software Foundation, a director at the Open Rights Group, and a veteran Google software engineer. He describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as an: "Extremely proficient programmer (over 30 years experience) and system designer. Security, cryptography, privacy and civil liberties are my passions." The Cambridge University graduate wrote on Twitter that he is "excited" and "proud" to be taking on the new role.

Jessica Hall recently wrote in Extreme Tech, "Over the last few decades, medical research has shifted from treating transient illnesses to curing long-term disease.

"Make an appointment for 4pm today with Gary," I say to my assistant as I hang up from a promising phone call with a potential client. There was a time when you had to be high up in an organisation to have an assistant. My assistant is an artificially intelligent piece of software that lives in my smart phone. It makes me wonder if technologies like these could help a business grow. A report called The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to automation was published in 2013 by researchers from Oxford University. It was used last year by the BBC to create the interactive web page, Will a robot take your job?.

London's IntelligentX Brewing Company has crafted the world's first beer brewed by artificial intelligence. Consisting of machine learning company Intelligent Layer and creative agency 10x, IntelligentX has developed an algorithm that takes feedback from consumers and uses it to influence its next batch of beer. After trying one of its four bottled conditioned beers, drinkers are invited to interact with its AI, a Facebook Messenger bot called ABI (Automatic Brewing Intelligence). The AI asks users a series of questions that take the form of multiple choice, yes / no and 1-10 rating responses. The responses are used to find trends that could be used to help improve subsequent batches.

Have you ever unknowingly spoken to someone who happened to be a computer? Take Scarlett Johansson's character in Spike Jonze's romantic drama Her (2013), for example. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his phone, Samantha. If one were to just listen to the audio, it would seem that Samantha is perfectly human in the way she thinks on her own and is able to carry out fully fledged conversations. As odd as that sounds, there's actually a method to test how "human" artificial intelligence appears to be: the Turing Test.

On a post-apocalyptic 2077 Earth, Tech 49 named'Jack' (played by Tom Cruise) works with drones to protect the fusion generators fueling colonists relocating to Saturn's moon. Hostile aliens capture, reprogram and arm one of the drones with a nuclear weapon. "You can't blame yourself… Drones are unreliable… Sometimes things go wrong." Sixty-two years earlier (in 2015), Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai (below) inherited the home planet of the Alphabet universe from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Per Pichai, the post-mobile Google is "normalizing" home and car computer interactivity.

The most sophisticated, widely adopted, and important tool for looking at living brain activity actually does no such thing. Called functional magnetic resonance imaging, what it really does is scan for the magnetic signatures of oxygen-rich blood. Blood indicates that the brain is doing something, but it's not a direct measure of brain activity. Which is to say, there's room for error. That's why neuroscientists use special statistics to filter out noise in their fMRIs, verifying that the shaded blobs they see pulsing across their computer screens actually relate to blood flowing through the brain.

The first Long March 7 flight took off from Wenchang, Hainan Island on June 25, 2016; to test new technologies in orbit that included space debris removal, satellite refueling and China's next generation manned spacecraft. On June 25, 2016, the Long March 7 rocket, China's largest space launch vehicle to date, blasted off from Wenchang, Hainan to a successful maiden flight. With a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) payload of 13.5 tons, the CZ-7 is China's new medium space launch rocket (the heavy Long March 5 will have its first flight later this year as well). In addition to that nice milestone for China's space program, the CZ-7 carried three important payloads in its cargo. The Tianyuan 1 satellite refueling system was carried in the upper stage of the first LM-7 rocket, and tested successfully days after the June 25th launch.

Billboards may never be the same. By early fall, a billboard in Tokyo will automatically identify the make and model of vehicles driving by it to display a targeted advertisement. "The ad could come up with'Hey you in the Mercedes, you could be driving this [instead],'" said Paul Turner, chief marketing officer with Cloudian, which is working with the Japanese company Dentsu on the project. A camera on the billboard will look hundreds of meters down the expressway to identify vehicles and present a corresponding ad for about five seconds. By targeting ads to specific types of vehicles, the companies should be able to charge a higher rate to advertisers.