As AI advances, could it replace your travel agent? To investigate just how effective a holiday planner AI can be, MailOnline Travel asked two chatbots - ChatGPT, created by California AI firm OpenAI, and Google's Bard - to plan a variety of trips. Scroll down to see the answers the chatbots provided, from hotel recommendations in Iraq to advice on planning budget sun holidays, honeymoons and stag weekends away. For a budget break in the sun, Bard recommended jetting off to Bulgaria, where it says that you can find a week-long all-inclusive holiday'for as little as £200'. MailOnline Travel asked ChatGPT and Google's Bard to plan a variety of holidays.

Researchers from York University's Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and Lassonde School of Engineering have revamped their Safe Water Optimization Tool (SWOT) with multiple innovations that will help aid workers unlock potentially life-saving information from water-quality data regularly collected in humanitarian settings.

It was while fleeing the civil war in South Sudan that Lual Mayen's mother gave birth to him 28 years ago. She had four children in tow and was near to the border with Uganda, in a town called Aswa. The journey was difficult; Mayen's two sisters died on the way and he became sick. No one thought he would survive. "I can't imagine what she had to go through. There was no food, no water, nothing," says Mayen. "I remember she said she was not the only woman who gave birth on the way. Other women abandoned their children because they didn't want them to suffer. But my mother thought: "He is a gift for me, I have to keep him."' Mayen's mother made it to northern Uganda with her newborn son and reunited with her husband in a refugee camp that remained their home for the next 22 years. Mayen grew up there, and although life was a struggle, he was happy and grateful for what he had. There wasn't much to do but Mayen says he found creative ways to keep himself entertained. Then, one day he had the chance to play the video game Grand Theft Auto, which mostly revolves around driving and shooting. "While I was playing, this thought came into my mind," he remembers. "In South Sudan, most of the population is under 30.

They are trying to get a head start, and unlike most of the 11,000 athletes who will be in Tokyo for the games, and thousands more for the Paralympics, they will be able to speak Japanese. "Just the language itself, I love it," said Abraham Majok, a runner who arrived in Japan in November with three other South Sudanese athletes and a coach. "And it's nice and since we started learning it. But, you know, we are moving well with it and we just love it." They are training northwest of Tokyo in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, supported mainly by donations from the public.

At this week's United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Red Cross teamed up with tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to announce an unlikely new tool to stop famine before it starts: artificial intelligence. The Famine Action Mechanism (FAM), as they're calling it, is the first global tool dedicated to preventing future famines -- no small news in a world where one in nine people don't have enough food. Building off of previous famine-prediction strategies, the tool will combine satellite data of things like rainfall and crop health with social media and news reports of more human factors, like violence or changing food prices. It will also establish a fund that will be automatically dispersed to a food crisis as soon as it meets certain criteria, speeding up the often-lengthy process for funding famine relief. For a famine to be declared in a country or region, three criteria have to be met: At least one in five households has an extreme lack of food; over 30 percent of children under five have acute malnutrition; and two out of 10,000 people die each day.

With plans for brand new megacities, allowing women to drive and foreign-run cinemas, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on a charm offensive trying to promote his country as an international investment destination. The strategy aims at luring foreign money to help the world's biggest oil exporter create a new economy away from oil dependency in order to prevent future instability. On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Riyadh's break-even oil price for 2018 is likely to be around $88 a barrel. North Sea Brent is currently trading down around $74 a barrel. And although the oil price is up considerably from 2014, the director of the IMF's Middle East department Jihad Azour said the focus in Saudi needs to remain on economic and social reforms.

Lual Mayen, a 24-year-old software engineer, is determined to do what he can to bring change to South Sudan, a country ripped apart by civil war. Through the use of board and video games, he wants to promote unity and spread his message of peace throughout the world. "After the conflicts that started in 2013, I saw the horrible effects mass displacement could have with my own eyes. I witnessed it in IDP and refugee camps, but also online," Mayen told Al Jazeera. "These social clubs, both online and offline, were turned into sites for social evils and I could see the conflict brewing among various tribes that were crammed together. I knew that these scenarios could turn political and even physical, with people wanting revenge for what was happening to them."