By 2017, it became clear that big tech companies were deeply interested in AI. In the same year, Pitchbook reported that companies around the world had spent USD 21.3 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, an amount believed to be 26 times more than its value in 2015. Jeff Wilke, former chief executive of Amazon worldwide consumer and close ally to company CEO Jeff Bezos then stated, "If you're a tech company and you're not building AI as a core competence, then you're setting yourself up for an invention from the outside." Between 2000 and 2016, companies like IBM and Microsoft were already investing heavily in AI research. Google and Facebook were only moderately involved in AI research and hiring researchers depending on how profitable the project they were working on was.

Tens of thousands of times a year, a technician places a drop of blood on a slide and peers at it under a microscope, searching for malaria parasites. Making a definitive diagnosis requires the technician to look at up to 300 different fields of view over roughly half an hour. This process is repeated over and over, day after day, on every continent except Antarctica. It's tedious work, but it saves lives. Malaria parasites infect over 200 million people and kill 400,000 every year, mostly children in Africa. Trained and experienced malaria microscopists are rare, however.

Capturing snowflakes on film can be quite the feat, as photographers have mere before the tiny ice crystal's intricate details melt – but a new video shows the event in reverse. Photographer Jens recently shared a stunning video showing already melted snowflakes freezing back to their original form. Each shot begins with a small droplet of water that begins to sprout icicles until it returns to the unique design. The movie was done using highly detailed macro photography, which is capable of making very small object look larger than life size. Capturing snowflakes on film can be quite the feat, as photographers have mere before the tiny ice crystal's intricate details melt – but a new video shows the event in reverse.

A renowned photographer has captured the highest resolution shots of snowflakes ever using a homemade prototype described as one part microscope and one part camera. Nathan Myhrvold, an American scientist, inventor, photographer and ex-chief technology officer of Microsoft, took 18 months to build the 100 megapixel camera capable of capturing a snowflake's microscopic detail. Using the camera, which he describes as the'highest resolution snowflake camera in the world', he took 100 frames of each snowflake in quick succession then stacked them for the whole image to be in focus. The results show the lush variety of snowflakes measuring only a few tens of millimetres in diameter, captured when Myhrvold was in Alaska and Canada. Pictured, stellar dendrite captured in Yellowknife, Canada.

Way back in the 1960s, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip was doubling every two years. Since the transistor count is related to processing power, that meant that computing power was effectively doubling every two years. Thus was born Moore's law, which for most people working in the computer industry – or at any rate those younger than 40 – has provided the kind of bedrock certainty that Newton's laws of motion did for mechanical engineers. There is, however, one difference. Moore's law is just a statement of an empirical correlation observed over a particular period in history and we are reaching the limits of its application.

Artificial intelligence (AI) bots are going to replace our jobs. AI machines will inevitably conspire to kill us all. These are exaggerated versions of three fears commonly associated artificial intelligence (AI). Even the late Stephen Hawking spoke about a potential future in which humans could be superseded by advanced forms of artificial intelligence. But these concerns are not so present in the mind of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft who once worked in Hawking's theoretical physics group at the University of Cambridge.