Apple is facing our face-masked future. This week, the company started testing some new software for the iPhone that will let device owners unlock the handset while wearing a face covering. There's a catch though, one that lines up with Apple's strategy of locking people in to different Apple products and highlights how challenging it can be to develop accurate facial recognition technology: The new face-unlock feature requires an Apple Watch. The first developer beta of iOS 14.5 includes updates to app tracking controls and Siri alongside the face-mask function. App-makers typically get early access to the newest version of iOS in order to launch or retool their apps well in advance of the formal software release. The fully-baked version of the software is expected to be made available to the general public this spring.

In this Article, a funding statement was inadvertently omitted from the Acknowledgements section. The following sentence should be added at the end of the Acknowledgements: 'This work was supported by NIH grant R01 EY011488 (D.F.), NIH grant K99 EY031137 (B.S.), the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, and the Max Planck Society.' The original Article has been corrected online.

New drone video shows the recent damage wrought on California's iconic Highway 1, where part of the road collapsed after heavy rains washed it into the ocean last week. The video, released by the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, shows a large part of the highway still flooded and covered with debris from recent rainfall and mudslides. At the point of collapse, about 45 miles south of Carmel in the Big Sur area, both lanes of the road are completely gone, with a massive hole sloping toward the Pacific Ocean in its place. The sheriff's office video shows water running through the collapsed part of the road, which by Friday had fallen into the sea. California has been plagued by extensive mudslides, largely in areas burned out during the previous season's wildfires.

TalkingData is a data intelligence service provider that offers data products and services to provide businesses insights on consumer behavior, preferences, and trends. One of TalkingData's core services is leveraging machine learning and deep learning models to predict consumer behaviors (e.g., likelihood of a particular group to buy a house or a car) and use these insights for targeted advertising. For example, a car dealer will only want to show their ads to customers who the model predicts are most likely to buy a car in the next three months. Initially, TalkingData was building an XGBoost model for these types of predictions, but their data science team wanted to explore whether deep learning models could have a significant performance improvement for their use case. After experimentation, their data scientists built a model on PyTorch, an open source deep learning framework, that achieved a 13% improvement on recall rate.

Soft robots with translucent "skin" can detect human touch with internal cameras and differentiate between a prod, a stroke or a hug. The technology could lead to better non-verbal communication between humans and robots. Guy Hoffman and his colleagues at Cornell University, New York, created a prototype robot with nylon skin stretched over a 1.2-metre tall cylindrical scaffold atop a platform on wheels. Inside the cylinder sits a commercial USB camera which is used to interpret different types of touch on the nylon.

Soft robots with translucent "skin" can detect human touch with internal cameras and differentiate between a prod, a stroke or a hug. The technology could lead to better non-verbal communication between humans and robots. Guy Hoffman and his colleagues at Cornell University, New York, created a prototype robot with nylon skin stretched over a 1.2-metre tall cylindrical scaffold atop a platform on wheels. Inside the cylinder sits a commercial USB camera which is used to interpret different types of touch on the nylon.

One of the best-studied networks in neuroscience is the brain of a fruit fly, in particular, a part called the mushroom body. This analyzes sensory inputs such as odors, temperature, humidity and visual data so that the fly can learn to distinguish friendly stimuli from dangerous ones. Neuroscientists have long known how this section of the brain is wired. It consists of a set of cells called projection neurons that transmit the sensory information to a population of 2,000 neurons called Kenyon cells. The Kenyon cells are wired together to form a neural network capable of learning. This is how fruit flies learn to avoid potentially hazardous sensory inputs -- such as dangerous smells and temperatures -- while learning to approach foodstuffs, potential mates, and so on.

Civil rights activists have successfully pushed for bans on police use of facial recognition in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, and Somerville, Massachusetts. Now, a coalition led by Amnesty International is setting its sights on the nation's biggest city--New York--as part of a drive for a global moratorium on government use of the technology. Amnesty's #BantheScan campaign is backed by Legal Aid, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and AI For the People among other groups. After New York, the group plans to target New Delhi and Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. "New York is the biggest city in the country," says Michael Kleinman, director of Amnesty International's Silicon Valley Initiative.