Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Tattoos, as anyone's concerned parents have reminded them, are notoriously permanent. But even ink needled under the surface of the skin can't withstand time's inescapable weathering. Untreated dead bodies eventually decay, and skin dotted with panels of stark-lined tigers or delicate wildflowers eventually break down to nothing more than the soil around it. A father and son team of morticians are trying to break that natural cycle using a secretive formula, preservative chemicals, and a taxidermist's eye.

With the arrival of the Pathfinder spacecraft in 1997, NASA began a series of missions to explore the surface of Mars with robotic vehicles. The Pathfinder mission included Sojourner, a six-wheeled rover with cameras and a spectrometer for determining the composition of rocks. The mission was a success in terms of delivering a rover to the surface, but illustrated the need for greater autonomy on future surface missions. The operations process for Sojourner involved scientists submitting to rover operations engineers an image taken by the rover or its companion lander, with interesting rocks circled on the images. The rover engineers would then manually construct a one-day sequence of events and commands for the rover to collect data of the rocks of interest. The commands would be uplinked to the rover for execution the following day. This labor-intensive process was not sustainable on a daily basis for even the simple Sojourner rover for the two-month mission. Future rovers will travel longer distances, visit multiple sites each day, contain several instruments, and have mission duration of a year or more. Manual planning with so many operational constraints and goals will be unmanageable.

The Las Vegas self-driving shuttle is one of many smart cities projects. Welcome to Las Vegas, city of smart lights, self-driving shuttles and startups. Away from the glittering, casino-strewn area known as the Strip is a far more pedestrian-looking area. It's just a 15-minute drive from Las Vegas Boulevard, but it feels like a different world. It's quiet downtown, because while the Strip was thronging with 200,000 extra visitors for CES 2020 last week, the streets here were cold and empty.

This week, Las Vegas officials announced a new plan to deal with the city's notorious gridlock and congestion. The city is installing cameras and traffic sensors connected to an artificial intelligence system at intersections throughout the city to help direct traffic in a more efficient way. The system will be used to make changes in the timing of traffic lights and the location of digital traffic signs, such as those that announce lane closures. Las Vegas announced a new plan to manage the city's brutal gridlock with a network of AI-connected cameras and sensors installed at intersections throughout the city So far, 30 intersections have been equipped with the sensors, and the city plans to add another 50 by next February. According to officials, the system should deliver efficiency gains of up to 40 percent to the daily traffic flow.

So far, 30 intersections have been equipped with cameras and sensors, mostly in the central business district. The city plans to expand that to 80 intersections in the next three months. The pilot project is part of Las Vegas's continuing smart city effort. In such projects, sensors are installed on streetlights, power grids, transit lines and other services to collect data that can be used to deliver services to people more quickly. Las Vegas has used the insights to change signal timing at certain times of day and to put up signage, such as wrong-way signs.

F. Allen et al., "Predicting the mutations generated by repair of Cas9-induced double-strand breaks," Nat Biotechnol, 37:64–72, 2019. During gene editing with CRISPR technology, the Cas9 scissors that cut DNA home in on the right spot to snip with the help of guide RNA. The way the genetic material is stitched back together afterward isn't terribly precise, though; in fact, scientists have long thought that without a template, the process is random. However, "there's been anecdotal evidence that cells don't repair DNA randomly," geneticist Richard Sherwood of Brigham and Women's Hospital tells The Scientist. A 2016 paper also suggested patterns in the repairs. Sherwood wondered if artificial intelligence could predict these outcomes.

This is part of our Road Trip 2017 summer series "The Smartest Stuff," about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you -- and the world around you -- smarter. A Las Vegas driver asks me this after I tell him I'm headed to Defcon at Caesars Palace. All week, a cloud of paranoia looms over Las Vegas, as hackers from around the world swarm Sin City for Black Hat and Defcon, two back-to-back cybersecurity conferences taking place in the last week of July. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the UPS store posts a sign telling guests it won't accept printing requests from USB thumb drives. You can't be too careful with all those hackers in town.

In late 2017, a government employee in Livingston County, Mich., plugged a personal laptop into the workplace server -- inadvertently exposing the network to malware. "We had 9,000 attacks within a few minutes from this computer," says Rich Malewicz, CIO and security officer for Livingston County. The county detected the attack and stopped it quickly using a program called Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide real-time alerts about abnormal activity on the network. "No device on the network detected [the attack] except for Darktrace," he says. More local and state governments are eyeing AI and machine learning as tools to help combat cyberattacks, in part because hackers themselves have adopted the technology.

This is part of our Road Trip 2017 summer series "The Smartest Stuff," about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you -- and the world around you -- smarter. A Las Vegas driver asks me this after I tell him I'm headed to Defcon at Caesars Palace. All week, a cloud of paranoia looms over Las Vegas, as hackers from around the world swarm Sin City for Black Hat and Defcon, two back-to-back cybersecurity conferences taking place in the last week of July. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the UPS store posts a sign telling guests it won't accept printing requests from USB thumb drives. You can't be too careful with all those hackers in town.

Las Vegas is one of the most bustling U.S. cities and because of the large casino operations in the city and electronic transfers of millions of dollars every day, cyber security is of prime importance. The city's information security team, which comprises of only three people, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to protect it against ransomware and phishing. "The things that keep me up most are ransomware and phishing. Some of the simplest attacks but the hardest to defend against." Las Vegas chief information officer Michael Sherwood told TechCrunch Friday.