The union of paleontology and robots has its roots in the more established field of bio-inspired robotics, in which scientists fashion robots based on modern animals. Paleo-roboticists, however, face the added complication of designing robotic systems for which there is no living reference. They work around this limitation by abstracting from the next best option, such as a modern descendant or an incomplete fossil record. To help make sure they're on the right track, they might try to derive general features from modern fauna that radiated from a common ancestor on the evolutionary tree. Or they might turn to good ol' physics to home in on the most plausible ways an animal moved.

Demand for high-end chips allows cryptocurrency companies to repurpose idle equipment

Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.--Attributed to Goethe But Missa solemnis 2.0, a collaboration between pioneering media artist and director Refik Anadol and The Philadelphia Orchestra (April 7, 9, 10, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage), brings Goethe's pithy saying to stunning visual and sonic life in ways the German literary giant never could have imagined. Beethoven completed his Missa solemnis in 1823. Despite being regarded as one of his most stunning musical creations, the piece is rarely performed. The composer's partner in this century-spanning project, Refik Anadol, was born in Istanbul. In 2008, while still an undergrad there, he presented his first digital art installation.

When James Clarke went to work at London's legendary Abbey Road Studios in late 2009, he wasn't an audio engineer. He'd been hired to work as a software programmer. One day not long after he started, he was having lunch with several studio veterans of the 1960s and '70s, the pre-computer era of music recording when songs were captured on a single piece of tape. To make conversation, Clarke asked a seemingly innocent question: Could you take a tape from the days before multitrack recording and isolate the individual instruments? Could you pull it apart?

Nostalgia website MyHeritage has launched a new service that allows you to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos. The AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia, launched last week, is free to try and is remarkably accurate in depicting how a person would look if captured on video. Their eyes blink, their head moves and their mouth forms a smile. "You'll have a'wow moment' when you see a treasured family photo come to life with Deep Nostalgia," Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage, said in a statement. "Seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history," he added.

In his new book Novacene, James Lovelock says the creation of AlphaGo was the start of a new kingdom of life that will create and think for itself. He's optimistic that this new kingdom of life will want to keep us around like we keep plants in gardens. In our interview at his house near Chesil Beach we discuss the future of Gaia, our new AI overlords and why Elon Musk's Mars mission is crazy.

Like a long-time partner or a favorite pair of socks, there's comfort to be found in revisiting a familiar game from your youth. There's a sense of ease knowing what lies inside each treasure chest, which bush an enemy will spring from, or the secret tactic that vanquishes a foe with ease. That calming intimacy makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off. But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memorization, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it?

There is a joke spies like to tell. They say prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and espionage is the second. Now, that self-proclaimed second-oldest profession is facing a seismic shift: Artificial intelligence is pervading to the intelligence community. American intelligence isn't what it used to be. Some of the types of secrets are changing, morphing from hidden gems cemented behind walls of government hush-hush to emerging signals washed out by open-source noise.

It's too late now to say sorry. This week was all about exploding that conventional wisdom. WIRED contributor Nick Stockton spoke to researchers who did the calculations and found, nope, traffic is actually a sign your city is doing well. Senior writer Jack Stewart chatted with Georgia Tech scientists who are learning important things about autonomous vehicle technology by testing little RC cars. And Uber escaped a crackdown in London, one of its most important markets, by apologizing profusely for its past wrongs.

In 2014 the UN called for a data revolution to put the best available tools and methods to work in service of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Researchers at the World Bank have responded to that call by scouring the globe for the latest machine learning tools to transform our approach to tracking progress in the fight against poverty. "Collecting household survey data on poverty is expensive and time-consuming, which means that policy makers are often making decisions based on old data," said Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Director of Research at the World Bank. "Machine learning could drastically change the game, making poverty measurement cheaper and much closer to real-time." Machine learning is a field of computer science that allows computers to examine large bodies of data to identify patterns that data scientists would never find on their own.