Who do we become when we die? Our identities are such fragile, personally curated things: we go through life as children, then students and peers, and sometimes switch to a vocational preference. A person becomes farmer, shepherd, mechanic, soldier, baker, homemaker, brigand, or bandit, or backyard bomb-maker -- whichever strikes us by calling or necessity. People assume narrower identities, a lover for an afternoon, a wedding guest for a weekend. Perhaps it's the wrong wedding, the wrong place, the wrong people, and whatever mish-mash of identities, they end with a hellfire strike and a grim, clinical finality. The bodies become "military-age males," the rich matrixes of interwoven identities collapsed into two categories, a fatal guilt decided abroad in the moment of impact.

Dave Addey doesn't just watch movies. Addey is the creator of Typeset In The Future, a website devoted entirely to fonts in science fiction. Why yes, it is a bastion of gloriously esoteric nerdery. It all began when Addey, a developer publications engineer at Apple and lifelong science fiction fan, started noticing the same font in every movie he watched: Eurostile Bold Extended. Designed in 1960, the font is geometric, functional, and looks good on the side of a spaceship (Star Trek).

Utilities are significantly increasing data gathering and using external data sets for smarter capacity and investment planning. Everything from weather data to 3D modeling of networks and extraction sites is being gathered, combined with internal and historical data sets and used to inform, predict and plan a variety of business outcomes. While not cheap to obtain, data is being used to make informed decisions on everything from when to shut down power stations to avoid over-capacity in the market, to where to drill and how to manage fluctuating water supplies. For example, moves in several markets to deploy smart meters, capable of feeding back consumption data in near real time, provide a valuable data resource for energy companies. This flow of information--which can update as frequently as every 30 seconds--provides valuable insight into real-world energy consumption and can provide early warning of peaks in demand.

NEW YORK – Here in the United States, the horrific shooting at a night club in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people has intensified the debate once again over the extent leaders must go to fight terrorism and gun violence. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the contrasting responses of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their attacks on one another suggest that a mud-slinging showdown between the two would-be national leaders is on track. And a world away, in the Philippines, the rhetoric surrounding the battle against terrorists and criminals is equally sensational. The one-time student of U.S. democracy has recently elected a leader of its own in political incorrectness. Who would have thought a man who vowed to kill criminals and grant himself a presidential pardon, who boasts of being a womanizer, has joked about wanting to rape a missionary and talked of the killing of journalists, would win a popular election and become head of state. Such is the dramatic turn of events in the Philippines, a nation shaped by centuries of Spanish and then by decades of American colonial rule.

It's been just about six months since IBM closed its acquisition of The Weather Company, but it's not resting on its laurels. This week Big Blue moved to leverage The Weather Company's go-to-market strength to launch Deep Thunder, a machine learning-driven weather model developed by IBM Research to help industries ranging from aviation and agriculture to retail better predict the business impact of weather. "One of the greatest things about being part of IBM is having a relationship with IBM's Research arm," says Mary Glackin, head of Science & Forecast Operations for The Weather Company. The Weather Company is actually merging its existing Rapid Precision Mesoscale (RPM) model -- a numerical weather prediction system based on the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecast System (WRF-ARW) -- with Deep Thunder. RPM generates forecasts up to 24 hours ahead, with updates every three hours in the U.S. and every six hours outside the U.S. Precipitation forecasts are calculated from half-hourly instantaneous precipitation forecasts provided by RPM.

In a series of surveys published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers asked people what they believe a driverless car ought to do in the following scenario: A group of pedestrians are crossing the street, and the only way the car can avoid hitting them is by swerving off the road, which would kill the passengers inside. The participants generally agreed that the cars should be programmed to sacrifice their passengers if doing so would save many other people. This, broadly speaking, is a utilitarian kind of answer -- one aimed at preserving the greatest possible number of lives. But there's one problem: The people in the survey also said they wouldn't want to ride in these cars themselves. It would be OK for others to buy them, the participants said, but they personally would not.

Flirtey's flight was a first on U.S. soil, but it doesn't necessarily mean the company now has free reign of the skies. Unrestricted drone-operated delivery of any kind in the U.S. – be it humanitarian relief or postal delivery – is still obstructed by layers of legislative red tape. And although Flirtey has received approval in the past for big-name events like these, experts tend to believe practical commercial drone delivery in any capacity is still a ways off.

There's a chance it could bring the mood down. Having chosen your shiny new driverless car, only one question remains on the order form: whether your spangly, futuristic vehicle be willing to kill you? To buyers more accustomed to talking models and colours, the query might sound untoward. But for manufacturers of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the dilemma it poses is real. If a driverless car is about to hit a pedestrian, should it swerve and risk killing its occupants?

Would you buy a driverless car that is programmed to kill you? Ok, how about a car programmed to kill you if it's the only way to avoid plowing into a crowd of dozens? That's one of the conundrums an international group of researchers put to 2,000 US residents through six online surveys. The questions varied the number of people that would be sacrificed or saved in each instance--if you want to try it for yourself, see if you'd make a good martyr here. The study, just published in the journal Science is the latest attempt to answer ethics' classic "trolley problem"--forcing you to choose between saving one life and saving many more.

Self-driving cars have a lot of learning to do before they can replace the roughly 250 million vehicles on U.S. roads today. They need to know how to navigate when their pre-programmed maps are out of date. They need to know how to visualize the lane dividers on a street that's covered with snow. And, if the situation arises, they'll need to know whether it's better to mow down a group of pedestrians or spare their lives by steering off the road, killing all passengers onboard. Once self-driving cars are logging serious miles, they're sure to find themselves in situations where an accident is unavoidable.