… awards first place to See-Thru-AI, a Chicago startup that helps companies using AI and machine learning to navigate complex regulations.

The British glove manufacturer Cornelia James is often in the public eye. Since 1979, it has provided gloves by royal appointment to the Queen of England, and more recently it has dressed megastars including Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Madonna. All those high-profile customers are great for publicity, but nobody drives sales quite like Kate Middleton, said Genevieve James, the company's creative director. "We get far more of a spike in sales when someone like Kate wears them. But when it's somebody like the Duchess of Cambridge, the public, particularly in the US, can relate to that," James told IBM. James first confirmed that fact in 2012 when, at a ceremony for Remembrance Sunday, Middleton wore a pair of Cornelia James' merino wool gloves.

THE idea that we are living in a historic, even apocalyptic, age exerts a powerful pull on the human mind. Eschatology – the theology of end times – is a religious concept, but crops up in many other systems of thought. Marxism and neo-liberalism were both driven by an "end-of-history" narrative. Scientific thinking isn't immune either: the technological singularity has been called eschatology for geeks, and the study of existential risk even has its own centre at the University of Cambridge. You don't have to believe in the four horsemen to see the apocalypse coming.