Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rubbing a black snail on a wart and impailing the creature with a thorn will make the bumps go away. Giving a donkey some bread will treat whooping cough . Mumps can be cured if you rub your head on the back of a pig . They may sound a bit strange now, but folk remedies like these are an important part of human history.

Crowd control Asses.Masses played by a live audience. Crowd control Asses.Masses played by a live audience. T his weekend, I spent more than eight hours in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with about 70 other people. Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting - in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles - transforms it into a piece of collective performance art.

With all the news coming out of Gaza, it has been easy to overlook the low-level war that Israel has been waging with Hezbollah, the paramilitary and political group in next-door Lebanon. But recently, both sides have been ratcheting up the rhetoric – and this bodes badly for the prospects for regional peace. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has finally been freed from prison and is back home in Australia with friends and family. However, as producer Johanna Hoes explains, the case against him still has some scary implications for journalists the world over. After years of economic turmoil following Brexit, a calamitous response to COVID-19, and a constant stream of news about government corruption and ineptitude, many British voters have lost faith in the entire political class.

Tnirte, Morocco – Abdel Abed is watching the other villagers digging. When one of them gets tired, he scrambles down and takes over. It has been five days since the magnitude 6.8 earthquake ripped through the mountainous regions around Marrakesh, Morocco, and Abed's daughter, nine-year-old Shaima, is still buried under the rocks. Abed still hopes she may be alive, a family member explains, and he works with almost robotic energy as excavation efforts continue in Tnirte in the High Atlas Mountains. His wife was pulled dead from the rocks yesterday.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. The term "generative AI" has been all the buzz recently. Generative AI comes in several flavors, but common to all of them is the idea that the computer can automatically generate a lot of clever, useful content based on relatively little input from the user. The initial recent excitement has been fueled by visual generative AI systems, such as DALL·E 2 and Stable Diffusion, in which the machine generates novel images based on brief textual descriptions. In a few seconds, you get a never-before-seen image of this well-read, well-traveled donkey.

Do you wish that you had a self-driving car of your own? With Donkey you can make that dream a reality. This week Will Roscoe shares the story of how he got involved in the arena of self-driving car hobbyists and ended up building a Python library to act as his pilot. We talked about the hardware involved, how he has evolved the code to meet unexpected challenges, and how he plans to improve it in the future. So go build your own self driving car and take it for a spin!

The way Google ranks pages in its search results today is much different from the way it ranked them two years ago. In early 2015, Google began its slow rollout of RankBrain, a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps process search results as part of Google's ranking algorithm. As of June 2016, RankBrain is being used for all Google queries. But how does machine learning impact rankings exactly? SEO used to be all about building links and using the right keywords.

This has been one of the biggest debates within SEO over the last year. Please note, this article was originally published on the Wordstream blog; it is reprinted with permission. I won't lie: I've become a bit obsessed with machine learning. My theory is that RankBrain and/or other machine learning elements within Google's core algorithm are increasingly rewarding pages with high user engagement. Basically, Google wants to find unicorns – pages that have extraordinary user engagement metrics like organic search click-through rate (CTR), dwell time, bounce rate, and conversion rate – and reward that content with higher organic search rankings.

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else. Instead, let's start with a little story. Imagine that it's 1890 and you and a friend have bought a donkey and cart and started a moving company that transports heavy objects, such as sofas and beds. If you work hard, you can manage two deliveries a day, for each of which you charge a price that, if adjusted for inflation, would amount to fifty-five dollars today. Let's say overhead, such as advertising and food for the donkey, comes to ten dollars a day.