Breathtaking drone video taken in the Arctic Circle captured a spellbinding reindeer'cyclone.' When threatened, reindeer will begin to stampede in a circle, making it hard for a predator to find an individual target. In the clip, the herd's fawns and does are in the middle of the swirl with the bucks running around them in a protective'dance.' The deer stampede was captured by a photographer last week in Murmansk, Russia, right before a veterinarian was about to give the herd its anthrax vaccinations. Such behavior has been observed in dolphins, bison and even elephants, but the aerial view--coupled with the herd's speed and size--makes for a truly hypnotic visual.

Self-driving cars will make the holidays even more joyous. The Christmas season is upon us and there is joy in the air. Stores are festooned with ornaments and sparkling lights. Music is heard throughout the malls and you can't help but start to feel the spirit of giving and sharing. It is time to be joyous, spending time with family and friends, and relishing precious time of togetherness and good tidings.

"It's a fight for talent…It's like'Game of Thrones' out there," Erik Caldwell, chief operating officer for supply chain in the Americas and Asia Pacific at XPO Logistics Inc., XPO 2.83% said at an industry conference earlier this year, discussing the company's use of robots to fulfill online orders. The use of robotics and other automation technology in industrial operations is growing, although the vast majority of warehouse work remains largely manual. About 16.5% of organizations across several industries including warehousing are now using commercial service robots, and 21.5% have them in pilot programs, according to a 2018 survey of 600 respondents by research firm IDC. The holiday shopping season highlights a warehouse-worker squeeze that is driving more logistics operators to embrace automation, as the growth of online commerce pushes more retail sales from storefronts to distribution centers. Online fulfillment centers--where companies like Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.94% pick, pack and ship consumer orders--require two to three times as many workers as traditional warehouses.

Neural networks are a type of computer program that imitate the way that brains learn to solve problems. They're used for face recognition, self-driving cars, language translation, financial decisions, and more. I mainly use them to write humor. My process starts with a dataset - something that the neural network has to figure out how to imitate. Rather unfairly, I give it no instructions about whether it's trying to write knock-knock jokes or invent Halloween costumes or begin a novel.

Christmas carol songwriters should be relieved to hear that they can keep their jobs for a little while longer. It turns out that artificial intelligence hasn't quite mastered the art of their job. In a Dec. 21 entry on her personal AI blog, Janelle Shane, a research scientist in industry and machine-learning hobbyist in her spare time, chronicles her journey of trying to teach a neural network to generate Christmas lyrics. I trained a neural network to write Christmas carols and it got confused. In retrospect I should have seen this coming.

A neural network enthusiast has shared the hilarious results of an experiment to let an AI write Christmas carols. With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some'Fa la la la's', it may have gotten some things right – but, it's doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree. The neural network, starting with no knowledge of what Christmas carols are, created songs filled with bizarre and nonsensical phrases, from'Hurry Christmas to you,' to'Santa baby, and Dancer, and Curry down.' With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some'Fa la la la's', it may have gotten some things right – but, it's doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree. To train the neural network, Shane fed it roughly 240 carols, collected by the Times of London and reader Erik Svensson.