In a disused military aircraft hangar buried deep in a granite hillside, Johan Tofeldt flicks a switch on the future of mining. "Look, no hands!" he beams, as the truck lurches backwards and executes a precise reverse. "It's a little heavy on the clutch, but then it's not designed for driver comfort." The cheerful Swede is sitting in a standard Volvo FMX heavy duty truck, a haulage industry workhorse. But where once there was a narrow bed behind the seat there is now a laptop and a tangle of wires.

In his book The Singularity Is Near, American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil had predicted a decade ago that by 2045 non-biological intelligence will have exceeded biological intelligence on Earth due to exponential changes in infotech, biotech and nanotech. Basically, man and machine will become one. But Murray Shanahan, a London-based cognitive robotics professor, disagrees with Kurzweil's theory in his more recent book, Technological Singularity. "Kurzweil was very precise (about time)," Shanahan tells China Daily in an interview in Beijing. "Technological singularity has a very dramatic impact on humanity."

The wildfire in Alberta, Canada, seems to be diminishing and residents should be able to return to the city of Fort McMurray over the next two weeks. The fire had appeared to be out of control just a few days ago but thanks to favourable weather conditions appears under control. The weather has played a huge part, but what about technology? AI, drones and satellites have all been used. Dr Guillermo Rein, from Imperial College, London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Fire Technology explains how tech is now incorporated in fire management.

WIRE)--CrowdStrike Inc., a leader in cloud-delivered next-generation endpoint protection, threat intelligence and response services, today announced enhanced next-generation antivirus (AV) capabilities to its CrowdStrike Falcon Platform to help customers identify and block popular ransomware families such as Locky, Cerber and Teerac, among others. The new protection is part of CrowdStrike's Spring release of new solutions and services that also includes introducing an expanded and updated set of APIs for the Falcon Platform, along with CrowdStrike's new open source tool, CrowdStrike Falcon Orchestrator. When dealing with the uptick in ransomware attacks, organizations need a combination of security features to protect against new variants of ransomware that are launched faster than outmoded signature-based defenses can be updated. As part of its next-generation endpoint protection technology, CrowdStrike uses powerful machine learning algorithms and Indicators-of-Attack-based (IoA) threat prevention to identify and block not only previously unknown ransomware families, but also new and emerging script-based ransomware that do not use executable binaries to encrypt the systems of victims. CrowdStrike's next-generation antivirus capabilities also offer complementary capabilities that include exploit blocking as well as cloud-driven anti-malware and machine learning to stop the execution and spread of ransomware.

Humanity's got itself a problem. As Homo sapiens balloons as a species--to perhaps nearly 10 billion by 2050--the planet stubbornly stays the same size, meaning the same amount of land must support way, way more people. Add the volatility of global warming and consequent water shortages, and the human race is going to have some serious trouble feeding itself. Perhaps it's serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet.

The Afghan Taliban named an Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour's deputies to succeed him Wednesday after confirming Mansour's death in a U.S. drone strike over the weekend. Within an hour of the announcement, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a shuttle bus carrying court employees west of the Afghan capital of Kabul, killing as many as 11 people and wounding several others, including children. New Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada was named in a United Nations report last year as former chief of the Sharia-based justice system under the Taliban's five-year rule over Afghanistan, which ended with their ouster in 2001. Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a feared network blamed for many deadly bomb attacks in Kabul in recent years, and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, will serve as deputies. The announcement, following a meeting of the Taliban's main shura, or leadership council, ended days of confusion during which the Taliban declined to confirm the death of Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday.

The Afghan Taliban named an Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour's deputies to succeed him on Wednesday, after confirming Mansour's death in a U.S. drone strike at the weekend. Within an hour of the announcement, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a shuttle bus carrying court employees west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing as many as 11 people and wounding several others, including children. New Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada was named in a United Nations report last year as former chief of the sharia-based justice system under the Taliban's five-year rule over Afghanistan, which ended with their ouster in 2001. Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a feared network blamed for many deadly bomb attacks in Kabul in recent years, and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, will serve as deputies. The announcement, following a meeting of the Taliban's main shura, or leadership council, ended days of confusion during which the Taliban declined to confirm the death of Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday.

An Amazon Prime package awaits pickup by its customer. SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon says it hasn't stopped price matching -- because it never had such a policy in the first place. Over the last several days, news stories and online forums reported the retail giant had ended its policy of reimbursing customers if the price of an item on its site drops within seven days of delivery. Amazon (AMZN) spokeswoman Julie Law said the company does not do what's known as "price matching" or "price protection," though its customer service associates are empowered to make decisions on behalf of the customer when it seems appropriate. "We've always had a no price matching policy, because we believe we're always making the best pricing decisions on behalf of our customers," she said.

On a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid's blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs. Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances -- which belonged to a 6-year-old boy -- a woman came running after them saying, "That's my kid's stuff." Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away. But it was too late -- a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of 80. Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting 86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store. Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

The supercomputer originally designed to win a game show is now learning how to fight crime. IBM announced on Tuesday that Watson, its artificial intelligence system, will be training to enhance cybersecurity. Watson already has some impressive accomplishments (for a supercomputer). Despite being a cookbook author,"Jeopardy!" winner, and health-care pioneer, it's still facing a steep learning curve when it comes to cybercrime, said IBM. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager at IBM Security, said in a press release. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime."