The invention of an artificial super-intelligence has been a central theme in science fiction since at least the 19th century. From E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops (1909) to the recent HBO television series Westworld, writers have tended to portray this possibility as an unmitigated disaster. 

Using a supercomputer scientists managed to simulate the creation and evolution of 8 million virtual universes, each containing 12 million galaxies - and in the process, they discovered something new about the universe we actually live in.

An Oklahoma judge on Monday ordered US health care giant Johnson & Johnson to pay $572m in damages for its role in fostering the state's opioid addiction crisis. In the first civil trial of a drugmaker over an epidemic that has caused hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, Judge Thad Balkman said prosecutors had demonstrated that J&J contributed to a "public nuisance" in its deceptive promotion of highly addictive prescription painkillers.

French and US negotiators have reached a compromise agreement on France’s digital tax, a levy which prompted US President Donald Trump to threaten a separate tax on French wine imports, a source close to the negotiations said.The compromise struck between French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Donald Trump’s White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow envisages that France would repay to companies the difference between a French tax and a planned mechanism being drawn up by the OECD.

Apple and Samsung have been hit with a class-action lawsuit over claims that their phones expose users to radio frequency emissions up to 500 percent beyond the limits "set forth by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)," the website Apple Insider reported on Saturday.

Japan and the United States have reached a broad agreement in trade negotiations, AFP reported Sunday, with the leaders of both countries expected to hold talks on the sidelines of the G7 summit.

Yesterday Russia launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 14 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station. Named Fedor, for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research with identification number Skybot F850, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia.

Banks in the euro zone are now allowed to get more time to set aside cash and cover loans that have gone or will go unpaid after the European Central Bank (ECB) bowed to pressure from Brussels to ease its rules on the matter.

Audi is set to join an alliance with rivals Daimler and BMW to develop advanced driving assistance systems, German weekly Wirtschaftswoche said on Thursday. According to the newspaper, Audi, a unit of Volkswagen will announce the alliance at the Frankfurt auto show in early September.

Intel has unveiled this week two new CPUs designed for large computing centers which will be the chipmaker's first to utilize artificial intelligence (AI). The two chips are company's first offerings from its Nervana Neural Network Processor (NPP) line, with the one being used to train AI systems while the other will handle inference.