And investors liked what they heard. Microsoft shares were up 0.4% to above 55 in afternoon trading on the stock market today, approaching their all-time high of 56.85, reached on Dec. 29. "Microsoft's Build conference was more exciting than we expected, with major announcements around machine learning, bots and AI," Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle said in a report Wednesday. "These products show Microsoft's development focus is moving beyond the cloud to Conversations as a Platform." Barnicle reiterated his overweight rating on Microsoft stock with a price target of 65.

After a quick run through with Lorraine Bardeen, GM Windows and HoloLens experiences, I was left alone in the living room to discover the digital information all around me. The juxtaposition of three-dimensional holograms and real objects had created a mixed reality. Interacting with the projections peppered in the room quickly started to feel like some sort of technological hallucination. The holograms were only visible to me. One of the first things I noticed about the headset was its see-through "holographic lens".

We'll have bots to thank for that, and Microsoft wants developers to embrace them, the same way hordes of developers embraced iOS apps back in 2008. "We want every developer to build experts for Cortana," Nadella said onstage Wednesday. "We want all developers to build bots." Because of the cross-platform nature of both Cortana and the many communication apps Nadella cited yesterday, Microsoft's bot army will work on whatever device you want to use. The company debuted a host of tools yesterday to make that happen, including the Microsoft Bot Framework, which will let developers build bots and deploy them across the various communication platforms we use.

If you didn't happen to be sitting near a computer during the opening ceremonies for Microsoft's Build developer conference yesterday, never fear: We've condensed the two-hour, opening-day keynote into a roughly 10-minute video. Included in our highlight reel are CEO Satya Nadella's opening remarks; the Windows 10 "Anniversary Update"; news on universal apps; a demo of new Windows inking features; Microsoft's surprise Linus news; a peek at HoloLens's packaging; and, most importantly, a glimpse at Microsoft's incoming army of chatbots. If you've got just 10 minutes, we'll give you all the meat, minus the fluff.

All those features sounded similar to what Google Now and the iPhone do now, but the difference here is that BMW Connect will sync up with your car as well (assuming it's a BMW running the ConnectedDrive platform). In addition to pulling in destinations and appointments from your calendar, the BMW Connected app will learn from your routines and places you search for commonly and give you travel times for those locations automatically. Frequent and recurring are stored and revealed to you when the app thinks you'll want to return to them. If you're a BMW driver, the big benefit here will likely be the way the app integrates into your car -- but lots of drivers would probably be just as happy using Android Auto or Carplay to tie their phones and vehicles together. That said, the new app ties right into your car, letting you unlock and lock the doors, flash the lights, kick up the AC before you're in it and so forth.

Toronto resident Simon Treadwell wheeled a garbage bin onto a snow-bound lot next to his property one evening this past winter. Inside the bin was a smelly mixture of wet and dry cat food, sardines, and fried chicken. Treadwell sprinkled some of the mix on and around the bin, made sure his three motion-activated night vision cameras were on, and went back into his house. Treadwell was testing a new lid latch he had devised in response to the city of Toronto's request for proposals: The city needed help keeping raccoons out of people's garbage. For over a decade, residents had been asked to place organic compostable materials such as vegetables, meat, bones, and even paper towels into green bins.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams' comedic sci-fi series from the 1970s, the Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three are one of the most insecure and angry life forms in the galaxy. They have "impatient chromosomes" that instantly adapt to their surroundings. If they are sitting at a table, for instance, and are unable to reach a coffee spoon, "they are liable without a moment's consideration to mutate into something with far longer arms … but which is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee." Susan M. Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine, quotes Adams' "(deliciously) askew" story in a research paper on mutations in evolution as an example of how, according to standard neo-Darwinian theory, evolution does not work. Organisms, all good students know, do not generate rapid genetic mutations in response to their environment. There are exceptions, such as mutations spurred by certain chemicals or radiation.

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10-6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude. Progress in the theory of computation suggests that sentience and intelligence likely require quadrillions of primitive "circuit" elements. Given that our brains are composed of neurons, which are themselves, in essence, specialized cooperative single-cell organisms, we can conclude that biological computers need to be about the physical size of our own brains in order to exhibit the capabilities that we have.

IBM says it wants to make intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans. This week, it shipped the NS16e, its largest brain-inspired computer yet, and has big goals ahead. The company plans to create bigger versions of the NS16e -- which was purchased by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- to come closer to matching the scale of a human brain. "Perhaps one day we may see a single rack of neurosynaptic system with as many neurons and synapses as in a human brain," said Jun Sawada, a researcher at IBM, in a blog entry. The brain can be viewed as an extremely power-efficient biological computer.

Russian combat engineers arrived in Syria on a mine-clearing mission in the ancient town of Palmyra after it was recaptured from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) this week. On Thursday, the Defence Ministry said sapper units were airlifted to Syria with equipment including state-of-the art robotic devices to defuse mines at the 2,000-year-old archaeological site. Russian television stations showed Il-76 transport planes with the engineers landing before dawn at the Russian air base in Syria. Sunday's recapture of Palmyra by Syrian troops under the cover of Russian air strikes was an important victory over ISIL fighters, who controlled the area for 10 months. Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoi of the military's General Staff said Russian advisers helped plan and direct the Syrian army's operation to recapture Palmyra.