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Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users.

The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014. XiaoIce has had more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident. Microsoft wanted to see if it could achieve similar success in a different cultural environment, and so Tay was born.

Unfortunately, the Tay experience was rather different. Although many early interactions were harmless, the quirks of the bot's behavior were quickly capitalized on. One of its capabilities was that it could be directed to repeat things that you say to it. This was trivially exploited to put words into the bot's mouth, and it was used to promote Nazism and attack (mostly female) users on Twitter.

On Wednesday night there was a break in at Comics Plus, a comic book shop in Macon, GA. According to WMAZ, a local news outlet, the bandit or bandits used a crowbar to pry open the door and then disabled the alarm system by cutting out the wires and ripping it off the wall.

While the robbers made off with a safe containing $2,200 in cash, the more valuable pilfered items were the first eight issues of Justice League of America as well as the first 20 issues of X-Men. The owner of the store, Will Peavy, said that the early 1960’s issues were graded, meaning they had been authenticated and given a score based on their condition.

Peavy said the Justice League set was worth $100,000, and he told WMAZ that the X-Men set also had a “six-figure value.”

Some polls have suggested that as many as 50 percent of Americans believe UFOs of extraterrestrial origin have visited Earth, and the percentage appears to be higher among Democratic voters. So perhaps Hillary Clinton was playing to her voters Thursday night when she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel's late night talk show on ABC.

In comments first reported by the Daily Caller, Kimmel mentioned the first thing he would do as president would be to rifle through the Area 51 files with the aim of finding out what the government knows about aliens. He also mentioned he'd asked Bill Clinton about that, and the 42nd president said he had looked and didn't find anything.

"Well, I'm going to do it again," Hillary Clinton said. "I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible. If there's nothing there then let's let people know there's nothing there." What if there is something there? "If there is something there, unless it's a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public."

Whether you prefer to play it safe or wade into risky business for larger payoffs, your decision process may largely depend on a tiny bundle of cells deep in your noggin.

By tagging and tweaking those cells in the brains of high-rolling rats, researchers were able to turn them from ballsy to cautious decision-makers. More specifically, the rodents switched their preference away from pulling a lever that released a jackpot of sugary treats 25 percent of the time to another lever that served up smaller-sized treats 100 percent of the time.

The finding, published in Nature, backs up previous studies in humans showing that drugs that interfere with those same brain cells can lead to gambling problems. The study also offers a neurological explanation for differences in risk-taking behavior as well as a target for new treatments for gambling addictions.

One of the oldest and most profitable patent trolls, Uniloc, has been shot down. Its US Patent No. 5,490,216, which claims to own the concept of "product activation" in software, had all claims ruled invalid by the Patent Trademark and Appeals Board (PTAB).

The process through which PTAB eliminated the patent is called an "inter partes reexam," or IPR. The IPR process, created by the America Invents Act, is an increasingly popular and effective way for defendants to challenge patents outside federal courts.

The PTAB case against Uniloc's patent was filed by Sega of America, Ubisoft, Cambium Learning Group, and Perfect World Entertainment. The board found that every claim in Uniloc's patent was anticipated or rendered obvious by an earlier patent.

Six people have been charged in what prosecutors say was a scheme to hack Connecticut state lottery terminals so they produced more winning tickets and fewer losing ones.

At least two of the suspects have been charged with felonies, including first-degree larceny, first-degree computer crimes, and rigging a game, according to an article published by The Hartford Courant. The suspects allegedly owned or worked at retail stores that produced winning tickets in numbers that were much higher than the state average. Of tickets generated at one liquor store, for instance, 76 percent were instant winners in one sample and 59 percent in another sample. The state-wide average, meanwhile, was just 24 percent. After manipulating the terminals, the suspects cashed the tickets and took the proceeds, prosecutors alleged.

The charges come several months after lottery officials suspended a game called the 5 Card Cash after they noticed it was generating more winning tickets than its parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended. Investigators say more arrests may be made in the future. Almost a year ago, prosecutors in Iowa presented evidence indicating the former head of computer security for the state's lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot.

Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, England, is the legendary resting place of King Arthur and Guinevere, and for centuries people have visited to see the grave of the mythical fifth-century King of the Britons and his bride. But the reality behind the abbey's claim to fame had little to do with early monarchy. It was mostly about economics.

Archaeology magazine's Jason Urbanus reports on new findings from University of Reading archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist, who heads up the Glastonbury Archaeological Archive Project, an intensive reexamination of 75 years' worth of excavations and discoveries from Glastonbury Abbey, many of which have been stored for decades without any scientific analysis. Gilchrist and her colleagues have found evidence that occupation of the Glastonbury site may indeed date back to the purported year of Arthur's reign in the fifth century, but not due to any mystical connection with the king.

We know for certain that Glastonbury was a thriving community in the seventh century, where Saxon villagers created large furnaces to melt down and recycle Roman glass. Gilchrist's project has confirmed that the glassworks predated the abbey, possibly by centuries, and was one of the largest glass production facilities in England at the time.