Apple's latest iPhone software update, iOS 13.5, released Wednesday, is there for you. Your eyes, nose and mouth must be visible for Face ID, Apple's facial recognition software, to recognize you. But with the coronavirus, device owners may be wearing masks when out in public. So Apple is making it easier for you to unlock your phone when you have a mask on. Install the update and you will no longer have to wait for Face ID to fail several times before being prompted to enter your passcode.

This article is part of Privacy in the Pandemic, a Future Tense series. Since the pandemic began, authorities in New Delhi, Italy, Oman, Connecticut, and China have begun to experiment with fever-finding drones as a means of mass COVID-19 screening. They're claiming the aircraft can be used to better understand the health of the population at large and even to identify potentially sick individuals, who can then be pulled aside for further diagnostic testing. In Italy, police forces are reportedly using drones to read the temperatures of people who are out and about during quarantine, while officials in India are hoping to use thermal-scanner-equipped drones to search for "temperature anomalies" in people on the ground. A Lithuanian drone pilot even used a thermal-scanning drone to read the temperature of a sick friend who didn't own a thermometer. Unfortunately, there's almost no evidence that these fever-detecting drones actually work.

Tiny drug-carrying robots that can move against the direction of blood flow could one day be used to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells. Metin Sitti at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany and his colleagues have developed tiny robots called "microrollers" that can carry cancer drugs and selectively target human breast cancer cells. The team drew inspiration for design of the robots from white blood cells in the human body, which can move along the walls of blood vessels against the direction of blood flow. The microrollers are made from glass microparticles and are spherical in shape. One half of the robot was coated with a thin magnetic nanofilm made from nickel and gold.

The dependency on automation has accelerated due to COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore companies are relying on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to have business continuity amid this crisis. AI and ML are not only transforming the way businesses operate, but also providing a massive opportunity for companies to gain a competitive advantage. However, due to several reasons – like lack of skilled talent and budget, along with an understanding of newer technologies – have created a host of barriers for enterprises to smoothly adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning for their organisations. In fact, according to a recent survey, approximately 50% of respondents reported that their organisations lack skilled talents to implement real AI.

The magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic will largely depend on how quickly safe and effective vaccines and treatments can be developed and tested. Many assume a widely available vaccine is years away, if ever. Others believe that a 12- to 18-month development cycle is a given. Our best bet to reduce even that record-breaking timeline is by using artificial intelligence. The problem is twofold: discovering the right set of molecules among billions of possibilities, and then waiting for clinical trials. These processes ordinarily take several years, but AI holds the key to radically shortening both.

In the summer of 2009, the Israeli neuroscientist Henry Markram strode onto the TED stage in Oxford, England, and made an immodest proposal: Within a decade, he said, he and his colleagues would build a complete simulation of the human brain inside a supercomputer. They'd already spent years mapping the cells in the neocortex, the supposed seat of thought and perception. "It's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rain forest," Markram explained. "How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees?"

The soldier who is a split second quicker on the draw may walk away from a firefight unscathed; the ship that sinks an enemy vessel first may spare itself a volley of missiles. In cases where humans can't keep up with the pace of modern conflict, machines step in. When a rocket-propelled grenade is streaking toward an armored ground vehicle, an automated system onboard the vehicle identifies the threat, tracks it, and fires a countermeasure to intercept it, all before the crew inside is even aware. Similarly, US Navy ships equipped with the Aegis combat system can switch on Auto-Special mode, which automatically swats down incoming warheads according to carefully programmed rules. These kinds of defensive systems have been around for decades, and at least 30 countries now use them.

Tesla is raising the price of its "self-driving" option on its electric vehicles worldwide starting with a $1,000 (£820) hike. Founder Elon Musk tweeted that the price "will continue to rise" as its technology improves. But the entrepreneur said the technology it's adding will be worth more than $100,000. Mr Musk has been in a battle with officials in California over the restarting of Tesla's US car assembly. Tesla's "full self-driving" (FSD) option is called Autopilot, although it isn't fully autonomous.

Humans and AI systems work better when they tackle problems together. The paper appears to be one of the first published by Horvitz since Microsoft named him chief scientific officer in March, the first in company history. Horvitz came to Microsoft as a principal researcher in 1993 and led Microsoft Research operations from 2017 to 2020. The paper released earlier this month studies the performance of human and AI teams working together on two computer vision tasks: Galaxy classification and breast cancer metastasis detection. With the proposed approach, the AI model determines which tasks are best for humans to perform and which are better handled by AI.

With the technology of artificial intelligence increasing and growing more complex, new forms of artificial intelligence is coming out of the closet. The changes of artificial intelligence are bringing prosperity and productivity to many but anxiety and paranoia to others, a fear of artificial intelligence replacing workers and jobs. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is very useful when tackling issues where humans fail or can't do for safety measures. With data stored in them, they are able perform tasks in such a quick and efficient speed that outperforms humans in every way. For example, some AIs can become safer drivers for passengers, as a result this makes rides safer and faster.