GE unveiled a machine data system for power plants it claims can increase a facility's efficiency of operation by 1.5%, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3%, and reduce coal consumption by 67,000 tons for each megawatt of electricity produced. GE's Digital Power Plant for Steam suite was introduced at the Minds Machines conference in Paris June 14, where GE executives also revealed the results of a hardware and software upgrade using the technology at the Chivasso power plant in Northern Italy. The plant, run by A2A Group, was restarted in November 2015 after a three-year shutdown. Digital Power Plant for Steam is one of the first application suites to sit atop GE's Predix machine data analytics platform and yield practical, industrial results. The reference to "steam" in the product's name reflects the fact that gas and coal-fired power plants produce steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity used in households and industry in most societies.

Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust. Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. "Remembrance is the secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile," he says, quoting Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.

Whether you're reading this article on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, chances are the device in front of you contains components from at least six countries spanning three or more continents. Its sleek exterior belies the complicated and intricate set of internal parts that only a global supply chain can provide. Over the past century, finished products made in a single country have become increasingly hard to find as globalization -- weighted a term as it is -- has stretched supply chains to the ends of the Earth. Now, anything from planes, trains and automobiles to computers, cellphones and appliances can trace its hundreds of pieces to nearly as many companies around the world. And its assembly might take place in a different country still.

In 2012 they went bankrupt. And according to a recent post by Dr Robert Goldman when technological singularity really kicks in, the same fate awaits many industries over the next decade. Self-proclaimed "Antiaging & Sports Medicine Pioneer" Dr Bob is a rather exuberant character and seemingly a big friend of the stars (he is pictured on the home page of his website with the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger). Yet I'm far more interested in his recent Facebook / LinkedIn post entitled'Future Predictions' which has gone viral and already been shared well over 100,000 times. Dr Goldman initially asks us to go way back to 1998 (where is the Doc's DeLorean when you need it?) It's interesting given that digital cameras had actually been invented over 20 years earlier.

"Political elections – for better or worse – have become a gameshow. The more social media, the more clickbait headlines … whatever generates a lot of buzz is one way to make our mark in an election," he says. Istvan has attracted countless profiles in the international press, been followed around by two film documentary crews and has secured a TV show once the election is over. It certainly seems to be benefiting Brand Zoltan. Could it all be an elaborate strategy to boost his profile and become a media personality?

A lovely nonthreatening body for a robot that can see warm bodies. Gamma 2 Robotics' RAMSEE borrows the name of pharaohs, which is fitting since it works the graveyard shift. The security bot is an autonomous patrolman, rolling around empty halls and hard-to-surveil places, its LIDAR eyes and infrared cameras scanning the environment around it at all times. It is a robot built for empty spaces, alerting its human overseers to any harmful intrusion of life. And here, a pair of the robots scan a hallway before peering into the beyond.

David: I've gone through this myself in the past couple of years. There is so much out there right now that if you have any interest in machine learning or data science topics, you can buy any number of good books that will give you overviews and get you started. There are online courses and tons of blogs that will cover a lot of this stuff. I would say the best thing to do is to get started and just try some stuff. Honestly, for basic machine learning, a good start is to take a look at our presentation.

Everyone seemingly is complaining about the spread of ransomware, and now somebody is trying to do something about it using machine learning-based behavioral analytics techniques to track suspicious behavior on company networks. As the scale of the ransomware threat grows, including ransom payments by hospitals and universities and growing fears that it will soon spread to other sectors, a Silicon Valley security intelligence firm has rolled out an approach for detecting ransomware via machine learning. Exabeam, a specialist in user and "entity" behavior analytics based in San Mateo, Calif., unveiled its analytics approach to detecting ransomware attacks during a security conference this week. See the full story at sister publication Datanami. George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 25 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.