Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon
Is life everywhere, or is life incredibly rare? The Cassini spacecraft takes on more pass at finding out by flying through the water vapor plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
—Tim Maher, Managing Editor

Epic Fail: Digitizing America’s Medical Records Was Supposed to Help Patients and Save Money. Why Hasn’t That Happened?
The U.S. government has handed out $28 billion to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic health records, hoping it will make health care cheaper and more effective. Returns have been slight because the funds have helped prop up companies building closed-off systems that don’t interoperate.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco Bureau Chief

Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines
Google has enhanced its search engine with an artificial neural network that has learned to relate different words according to their meaning. Facebook is using the same technology Facebook to try to make software capable of basic conversation (see “Teaching Machines to Understand Us”).
—Tom Simonite

Frightgeist
Happy Halloween! Google’s here to tell you whether your costume is original or not.
—Nanette Byrnes, Senior Editor, Business Reports

Greenland Is Melting Away
The New York Times goes to Greenland to capture in stunning detail how melting ice will affect the rest of the world.
—Brian Bergstein, Executive Editor

Inside the Surprisingly Sexist World of Artificial Intelligence
Quartz asks if bringing more women and minorities into computer science and AI research might not help broaden and improve the two fields’ goals and perspectives.
—Will Knight, Senior Editor, AI

Walmart Seeks to Test Drones for Home Delivery, Pickup
The U.S. retail giant apparently plans to get into a dogfight with Amazon, Google, and others vying to delivery products by air.
—Will Knight