VENICE LIDO, Italy – When the highly anticipated remake of Frank Herbert's influential '60s novel world premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival, it was "Dune -- Part 1." Now as Denis Villeneuve's lauded adaptation opens nationwide, it's simply "Dune" -- maybe because no one knows if there will be a concluding Part 2. "The biggest challenge," said Villeneuve ("Sicario," "Arrival") "is that the book is so rich and its strength is all in its details. I had to find equilibrium for someone who doesn't know the book at all and be as cinematic as possible. So that they will need to understand the movie without crushing them with exposition. So the ideas could follow the story." "Dune" is set far into a future where Oscar Isaac's Duke rules the kingdom of Atreides.

William Shatner, 90, boarded one of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin tourist rockets and got to go on a 10-minute trip to space. Renowned for his role as Captain Kirk on'Star Trek', Shatner was able to bring some science fiction to reality, becoming the oldest person to ever reach space.

From the all-knowing HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Sonny in I, Robot to Ava in Ex Machina, AI has always been portrayed as an otherworldly intelligence. But, with the advent of the smartphone, AI is in everyday life. Here is the list of top unusual AI-powered smart home gadgets you can buy in 2021. AI meets home security with the Hex Home DIY Security System. This home security device is powered by ambient sensing and AI technology for better coverage throughout your home. It can tell the difference between an intruder and your pets, avoiding false alarms.

As we shift to an "everything is software" reality, automating the entire software delivery cycle becomes crucial. As mentioned in my previous article, automated testing has fallen short of delivering the quality and speed needed to meet today's innovation delivery. Automated testing is still a bottleneck for many software engineering teams, as test planning and authoring, test maintenance and analysis of test results are still done manually. Current test automation tools widen this bottleneck by delivering tools and scripts that minimize manual intervention. However, as applications become smarter, software is being deployed faster than ever before, and companies must ensure that user experience is exceptional on an endlessly growing number of different computers, mobile devices, browsers and applications.

What would you think about a mask that allows you to enjoy the synthesized smells of fine cuisine? How about a floating house for people displaced by higher sea levels due to climate change? These are among the ideas that Sony Group Corp. have dreamed up -- all based on stories created through a collaboration between science fiction writers and Sony's young in-house designers. Such stories offer a peek into the future envisioned through an author's bold imagination, with details of the imagined futures used to develop prospective products and services. This method is called sci-fi prototyping. While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented scenes like those from a sci-fi movie, such as eerily empty cities due to lockdowns, Japanese companies such as Sony are starting to explore unconventional methods to come up with novel ideas.

Humanity has dreamed about developing an intellect equal to or greater than our own since the dawn of science fiction in a story called Frankenstein. There are several movies in which, there were several artificial intelligence characters. They acted like human beings. Indeed, artificial intelligence (AI) has beyond the realms of science fiction, and it has become the optimistic forecast for developing thinking, sentient robots. From 2001 to Star Wars and everything in between, the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) has been a mainstay of the genre, as well as the objective of many real-life Shelley devotees.

To say Apple TV's Foundation diverges from its source material would be a bit of an understatement. An adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction novels, Foundation is less interested in following its source material to the letter than it is in creating a story within Asimov's universe that would make good TV. The basic plot remains the same: mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) foretells the fall of the Galactic Empire thanks to his theory of psychohistory. Knowing the fall is inevitable, he establishes the Foundation in order to preserve knowledge and, hopefully, civilization in the years to come. Foundation takes this story and tweaks it in some pretty big ways, which makes sense when considering the scale of Asimov's work.

The world of today is a trying place. Sometimes you just want an escape hatch that lets you live inside another take on our present or future. That's what makes good science fiction so alluring. All the Amazon Prime subscribers out there should know: You have a boatload of options to choose from in the online retailer's streaming library. There's a little something for fans of any style of sci-fi you could imagine, from comedy to horror to drama to just plain "this is weird AF." Here's a selection of some of our favorites that you can find and fire up right now.

It may not be theoretically possible to predict the actions of artificial intelligence, according to researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Humans and Machines. "A super-intelligent machine that controls the world sounds like science fiction," said Manuel Cebrian, co-author of the study and leader of the research group. "But there are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it [sic]." Our society is moving increasingly towards a reliance on artificial intelligence -- from AI-run interactive job interviews to creating music and even memes, AI is already very much part of everyday life. According to the research group's study, published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, to predict an AI's actions, a simulation of that exact superintelligence would need to be made.

Johan den Haan is CTO of Mendix, a Siemens business and leader in enterprise low-code, a model-driven approach for building apps 10x faster. Is AI the transformative technology destined to work wonders for humanity, from driverless cars to a cure for cancer? Or is it a genie in a bottle that, once released, could be used to manipulate or even rule humankind? With the tremendous advances in computing power, software capabilities and the cloud over the last decade, progress on AI is no longer linear -- it's exponential. That means it's time to pay attention and make some fundamental decisions.