Eímear Noone got into composing and conducting video game music by accident. One day, while studying music at Trinity College Dublin, a fourth-year student came to the bar she was drinking in with members of the college chapel choir and offered them a few quid to help with the orchestration on a project of his. "I have a vivid memory of sitting on a studio floor somewhere in Dublin writing choral parts with my pals and then singing them," she says. "Six months later my brother calls me in a complete tizzy and says, 'Did you work on Metal Gear Solid?' I was like, 'No!' He says, 'Well, I'm looking at your name on the screen credits right now.' And sure enough, the session she had contributed to for beer money was the soundtrack to Hideo Kojima's blockbusting adventure game. "Years later I was at the Bird's Nest in Beijing at the Olympic Stadium conducting this very piece of music," she says. Noone is now a hugely successful film and video game composer, having contributed scores for directors such as Gus Van Sant and Joe Dante, and for games, World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Hearthstone. In November, she's presenting her second series of High Score, Classic FM's agenda-setting programme dedicated to game music. Underappreciated outside of game fandom for years, the genre is now huge business with dedicated orchestras playing sold-out global concert tours. And Noone is a passionate advocate – very keen to explore and explain the unique elements of the art form. There is, of course, a foundational similarity between game and film scores – they are both composed to accompany and accentuate screened action. But while a film score needs to accompany a two-hour linear experience with specific cues and events, video game music must be there for many hours of play. Most open-word action adventures, the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins, Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV, offer over 100 hours of narrative, but many players will spend much longer exploring. Music scores also have two different roles in games: they accompany the non-interactive cinematic sequences that set up the story and occur throughout a game – sort of like short animated movie sequences; and they provide background music while you play. "Cinematic are scored very similarly to a movie or an animated film.

Scientists gathered on March 1 in Bethesda, Maryland, for the 2018 NIH Alzheimer's Disease Research Summit, ready to absorb the 82 presentations scheduled over two days. Then a nor'easter forced closure of U.S. government buildings and put the kibosh on Day 2. Even so, researchers seemed impressed by the summit. Scientists interacted across disciplines with colleagues whom they might not otherwise meet, and the NIH took away 75 pages of funding recommendations for future research. "There were a lot of interesting ideas, from basic science to clinical studies," said Marco Colonna, Washington University, St. Louis.

Three big themes at CES in Las Vegas for enterprises to watch look to be big data, connected devices or the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence (AI), and sometimes the combination of all three. CES is one of the largest and most popular technology trade shows offering the latest gadgets for both consumers and IT business professionals and the 2017 edition opens to the public Jan. 5. This year, enterprise IT department specialists can expect to see the continued reign of data collection, connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI) – and combinations of all three. IBM Corp., for example, has placed a special focus on encouraging companies to become what it calls a "cognitive business" through using its Watson AI system to understand, reason, learn and make sense of collected data. IBM says this will allow companies to "improve business outcomes and increase revenue."