During the last week of July, Russia mounted its largest assaults in eight months in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region, seizing a string of settlements in an apparent bid to cut off key supply routes and force a mass Ukrainian retreat. At the same time, Ukraine scored a high number of hits on Russian energy infrastructure and occupied Crimea, suggesting that its strategy of degrading Russian air defences is working. Russian assaults focused on central and southern Donetsk – from areas west of Bakhmut, which fell in May last year, to areas west of Avdiivka, which was lost in February, down to areas west of the city of Donetsk, which pro-Moscow separatists have controlled since 2014 – a line about 130km (80 miles) long. Russian forces have pressed their advantage in these areas to prevent Ukraine from digging entrenched defences, and they have inched forward for months, swallowing settlements at a staggering cost to their own troops. British military intelligence estimated that Russian casualties in May and June reached record daily highs of about 1,200 – about 70,000 soldiers for just those two months.

Over the summer, Landon Garrison, a 21-year-old computer science major, spent roughly 12 hours each day writing the code for a website he's just launched called clevrML. The website offers easier solutions for people looking to build artificial intelligence based programs. "(I wanted) to make the process of making these artificial intelligence models easier, and simpler, without having to write any code," Garrison said. "For the code that you do have to write, if you do want to, for developers, it's very simple, very straightforward, and pre-made. He saw what he believed to be a hole in the market, for an easier, more affordable way to offer A.I. "In A.I. right now there's a trend of model sizes and computation going up, and I figure for most people it needs to go down and be more affordable for everybody," he said.

In July 2016, a group of archaeologists commissioned a small plane--along with special pilots--to fly over the thick jungle canopy in northern Guatemala, near the border with Mexico. Cruising well above the trees, the pilots combed the area, pointing three lasers at the ground that fired 300,000 pulses of light per second. Over 12 days, the team used the lasers to create one of the largest-scale maps of Maya cities built between 1000 BC to 1500 AD. Although archaeologists have surveyed slivers of these metropolitan ruins in the past, the new maps showcase entire cities for the first time, putting the Maya's formidable pyramids, city roads, and farming terraces in context. This view offers a wider perspective to archaeologists, who have historically been stuck analyzing individual structures at a time.

The healthcare analytics market is booming and will be worth close to $54 billion worldwide by 2025, according to a March 2018 report from Grand View Research. Given the need to achieve the Triple Aim, along with the rise of precision medicine and the move toward value-based care, data analytics have never been more important to healthcare provider organizations. As the technology continues to grow and mature, here's the pressing question for healthcare and IT leaders: How will analytics tools evolve – and what should they expect to come next? We asked experts from across the industry about major shifts on the horizon. Here's what they said healthcare decision-makers should be tracking now.

GUATEMALA CITY – The tens of thousands of ancient Maya houses, buildings, defense works and pyramids that have been discovered in the dense jungle of Guatemala's Peten region suggest that millions more people lived there than previously thought. The discoveries, which included industrial-size agricultural fields and irrigation canals, were announced Thursday by an alliance of U.S., European and Guatemalan archaeologists working with Guatemala's Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation. The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands, so massive food production might have been needed. "That is two to three times more (inhabitants) than people were saying there were," said Marcello A. Canuto, a professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. Researchers used a mapping technique called LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging.

In what's being hailed as a "major breakthrough" in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala. Laser scans revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures that were part of a vast network of cities, fortifications, farms, and highways. Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for "Light Detection And Ranging"), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed. "The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research. Garrison is part of a consortium of researchers who are participating in the project, which was spearheaded by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that fosters scientific research, sustainable development, and cultural heritage preservation.

For the Winter '17 cohort in collaboration with Macquarie Group, over 800 companies were vetted and 10 were accepted. The selected scaleups cover a range of technology verticals applicable to all enterprise. Collectively, the scaleups have raised £40m to date, have between 10 and 40 employees each and have an incredible breadth of enterprise clients -- ranging from Airbnb to Aston Martin to Barclays to Compass Group to L'Oreal to Wells Fargo. Collecting leads at events is a broken process. We're here to fix it.

The US military says it has shot down an armed, Iran-made drone that had been bearing down on its forces near a garrison in Syria's southeast. In the latest sign of increasingly frequent confrontation with Damascus and its allies, Tuesday's incident closely followed Sunday's US downing of a piloted Syrian army jet in the southern Raqqa countryside after it dropped bombs near US-backed forces. The Pentagon said a US F-15 aircraft, flying over Syrian territory, fired on the drone after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it had "dirty wings", meaning it was armed. "I can tell you it was an Iranian-made drone," Davis said, declining to speculate on who was operating it.

The United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that it wanted to keep the focus on fighting the Islamic State and was not looking for a confrontation with the Assad government -- or with the Russian and Iranian-backed forces that are supporting it. "The coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian or pro-regime forces partnered with them. To protect the garrison at al-Tanf, the United States has warned Iranian-backed militias and Syrian forces to stay out of the "deconfliction" zone it has declared around the base. On June 6, the American-led coalition again bombed Iranian-backed fighters that ventured inside of the restricted area.

With 18 months of managed cloud services under its belt, ZeroStack says it's ready to start feeding what it's learned into machine learning algorithms, aiming to further automate the private cloud. The goal is to let application developers run jobs without worrying about things like storage capacity or the optimal placement of applications, says Steve Garrison, the startup's vice president of marketing. "A lot of people are wanting to refrain from managing anything on-premises any more. This is why public cloud is taking off," Garrison says. What ZeroStack offers is infrastructure that can be consumed as if it were a public cloud, but that remains under control of the enterprise -- a "neutral hybrid" alternative for work that the enterprise would prefer to keep closer to home, he says.