A European spacecraft has blasted off on a quest to explore Jupiter and three of its ice-encrusted moons. Dubbed Juice, the robotic explorer set off on an eight-year journey Friday from French Guiana in South America, launching atop an Ariane rocket. Juice is taking a long, roundabout route. It should reach Jupiter in 2031 and spend three years buzzing Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. Then it will attempt to enter orbit around Ganymede, our solar system's largest moon. The three moons are believed to harbor underground oceans, where sea life could exist. If underground seas are confirmed, ice picks and a submarine could be next up.

Ukraine has bought some 1,400 drones, mostly for reconnaissance, and plans to develop combat models that can attack the exploding drones Russia has used during its invasion of the country, according to the Ukrainian government minister in charge of technology. In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov described Russia's war in Ukraine as the first major war of the internet age. He credited drones and satellite internet systems like Elon Musk's Starlink with having transformed the conflict. Ukraine has purchased drones like the Fly Eye, a small unmanned aerial vehicle used for intelligence, battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance. "And the next stage, now that we are more or less equipped with reconnaissance drones, is strike drones," Fedorov said.

Microsoft agreed Wednesday to make the hit video game Call of Duty available on Nintendo for 10 years should its $69 billion purchase of game maker Activision Blizzard go through -- an apparent attempt to fend off objections from rival Sony. The blockbuster merger is facing close scrutiny from regulators in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Microsoft, maker of the Xbox game console, faces resistance from Sony, which makes the competing PlayStation console and has raised concerns with antitrust watchdogs about losing access to what it calls a "must-have" game title. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, tweeted that Microsoft "entered into a 10-year commitment" to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo. Microsoft President Brad Smith tweeted his thanks to Nintendo, which makes the Switch game console, saying the same offer was available for Sony.

As more nurses leave their jobs in hospitals and health-care centers, foundations are pouring millions of dollars into efforts to ensure that more stay in the profession and get more out of the job than just the applause and pats on the back they got during the bleakest days of the pandemic. The gift is designed to extend for decades. The latest grant installment will focus on improving access to care and attracting people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to the nursing work force. Projects include programming robots to take care of some of the routine aspects of nursing and providing extra training to nurses before they are thrown into the pell-mell of the hospital floor or busy clinic. That extra instruction could have helped nurses like Muroo Hamed, who worked grueling hours in difficult circumstances through the early stages of the pandemic.

"Gaslighting" -- mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful -- is Merriam-Webster's word of the year. There wasn't a single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year. "It's a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us," said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday's unveiling. "It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year," he said. There were deepfakes and the dark web.

Facial recognition technology is mostly associated with uses such as surveillance and the authentication of human faces, but scientists believe they've found a new use for it -- saving seals. A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of dozens of harbor seals in Maine's Casco Bay. The team found the tool's accuracy in identifying the marine mammals is close to 100%, which is no small accomplishment in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals. The researchers are working on expanding their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram, a biology professor at Colgate and a team member. Broadening the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help inform conservation efforts to save those species, she said.

Japan is investing almost half a billion dollars to beef up semiconductor development and production in a "last chance" attempt to keep its position as a major player on the global technology stage, the government said Friday. The new company Rapidus, which means "quick" in Latin, will work on developing next-generation, or "post-5G," semiconductors, according to the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry. These advanced chips will allow for smart gadgets and smart cities with high-speed sensors and transmission. The components have to be extremely thin -- a fraction of a hair's breadth. The 70-billion-yen ($490-million) effort will involve working closely with major Japan ally the U.S. to bring together "the best and the brightest" from both nations, the ministry said in a statement.

Russia's troops fought Thursday to regain lost ground in areas of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed while Moscow tried to pound the invaded country into submission with more missile and drone attacks on critical infrastructure. Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions near Bilohorivka, a village in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. In the neighboring Donetsk region, fighting raged near the city of Bakhmut. Kremlin-backed separatists have controlled parts of both regions for 8½ years. Putin declared martial law in Luhansk, Donetsk and southern Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Wednesday in an attempt to assert Russian authority in the annexed areas following a string of battlefield setbacks and a troubled troop mobilization.

Soon enough, a bedside Amazon device might know whether you're sleeping -- or not. The e-commerce and tech giant said Wednesday it will start selling a device later this year that can track sleeping patterns without a wristband. The device, called Halo Rise, will use no-contact sensors and artificial intelligence to measure a user's movement and breathing patterns, allowing the device to track sleep stages during the night, the Seattle-based company said. Amazon said the device "does not include cameras or microphones," and will go for $139.99. The Halo Rise would be the latest device in Amazon's Halo line, which includes a fitness tracker that can track physical activity and sleeping patterns.

In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away. A spacecraft named Dart will zero in on the asteroid Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock -- demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we'd stand a fighting chance of diverting it. "This is stuff of science-fiction books and really corny episodes of "StarTrek" from when I was a kid, and now it's real," NASA program scientist Tom Statler said Thursday. Cameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take days or even weeks to find out if it actually changed the orbit.