At long last, NASA's Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en route to its target: Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft gets there, it will conduct dozens of close flybys in order to determine what that ocean is like and, crucially, where it might be hospitable to life. Europa Clipper is still years away from its destination--it is not slated to reach the Jupiter system until 2030. But that hasn't stopped engineers and scientists from working on what would come next if the results are promising: a mission capable of finding evidence of life itself. Living as long as a thousand years, the American chestnut tree once dominated parts of the Eastern forest canopy, with many Native American nations relying on them for food.

Mailchimp may have started out as an easy to use newsletter tool, but that was almost 20 years ago. Today's company still does email, but at its core, it is now a marketing automation platform for small businesses that also offers a website builder, basic online stores, digital ad support and analytics to make sense of it all. Like before, though, the company's main goal is to make all these features easy to use for small business users. Today, Mailchimp, which has never taken outside funding, is taking the next step in its own transformation with the launch of a set of AI-based tools that give small businesses easy access to the same kind of capabilities that their larger competitors now use. That includes personalized product recommendations for shoppers and forecasting tools for behavioral targeting to see which users are most likely to buy something, for example.

I find the buzzword business quite frustrating sometimes. It seems to enjoy messing with meanings and having me gasping over its grammar. At first glance, artificial intelligence is a contradiction in terms. Intelligence is, after all a human ability to acquire, process, and apply knowledge and skills to situations, and so move the frontiers of knowledge outward. If it were artificial, surely we would still be sitting up in trees and eating chestnuts.