Ten Fascinating Things

1. The next blockbuster drug may owe its success to AI: how deep learning will find patterns in genomic and medical data to inspire new therapies.
2. India and Pakistan are renewing their love affair with coal — but with America as a role model, that’s hardly surprising.
3. Hold on one apple-pickin’ minute! Orchard laborers will need to watch their jobs now that robots can spot and pluck fruits just as well humans.
4. The nervous and immune systems seem unconnected, but Nature explains how tiny electric shocks may help the former to stimulate the latter.
5. AI is a black box to humans, but Nvidia is letting people peer inside to see how its self-driving car technology works.
6. This Bloomberg piece describes how Microsoft continues to out-innovate Apple with new hardware. Question is: are we ready to buy the future?
7. This striking photo essay explores the epic scale of Airbus’s assembly line.
8. A new blood test can discern the genetic subtleties of different prostate cancers, which should allow doctors to target treatments more effectively.
9. How does an ecologist go about counting bird populations? Nowadays, using high-resolution satellite imagery to identify the creatures one-by-one.
10. No water? No problem, at least for the United Arab Emirates: one Abu Dhabi firm plans to tow icebergs from Antarctica to harvest pure drinking water.