Norway has become the first country to switch off FM radio despite concerns about the move being premature. The northern county of Nordland stopped broadcasting using analogue frequencies on Wednesday as the Government plans to roll out digital-only radio over the course of the year. Oslo hopes the measure will save 200 million Norwegian krone (£19 million) a year as the country has struggled to make sure its ageing FM equipment still emits signals over its vast, sparsely populated territory, which is covered in signal-blocking fijords and forests. Stephen Lax, a lecturer in Communication Technology at the University of Leeds, told the New Scientist that Norway's geography made analogue radio transmission particularly difficult. He said: "Norway has many mountains and valleys that the robust nature of DAB can help with. "Additionally, its FM radio infrastructure was coming to the end of its life, so they would've needed to either replace it or fully commit to DAB anyway.

The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand. Despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree. Those may sound like the Luddite ravings of a crackpot who breached security at an IEEE conference. In fact, the opinions belong to IEEE Fellow Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan is one of the world's most respected authorities on machine learning and an astute observer of the field. His CV would require its own massive database, and his standing in the field is such that he was chosen to write the introduction to the 2013 National Research Council report "Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis." San Francisco writer Lee Gomes interviewed him for IEEE Spectrum on 3 October 2014. IEEE Spectrum: I infer from your writing that you believe there's a lot of misinformation out there about deep learning, big data, computer vision, and the like. Michael Jordan: Well, on all academic topics there is a lot of misinformation. The media is trying to do its best to find topics that people are going to read about. Sometimes those go beyond where the achievements actually are.

Jun Wang, founder of digital biotechnology firm iCarbonX, showcases the Meum app that will use reams of health data to provide customized medical advice. One of China's most intriguing biotechnology companies has fleshed out an earlier quixotic promise to use artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize health care. The Shenzhen firm iCarbonX has formed an ambitious alliance with seven technology companies from around the world that specialize in gathering different types of health-care data, said the company's founder, Jun Wang, on 5 January at the Digital Life Summit, which was hosted by iCarbonX. The alliance will use algorithms to analyse reams of genomic, physiological and behavioural data and provide customized health and medical advice directly to consumers through an app. The announcement was a long-anticipated debut for iCarbonX, which Wang founded in October 2015 shortly after he left his leadership position at China's genomics powerhouse, BGI, also in Shenzhen.

Opining about the future of AI at the recent Brilliant Minds event at Symposium Stockholm, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt rejected warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about the dangers of AI, saying, "In the case of Stephen Hawking, although a brilliant man, he's not a computer scientist. Elon is also a brilliant man, though he too is a physicist, not a computer scientist." This absurd dismissal of Musk and Hawking was in response to an absurd question about "the possibility of an artificial superintelligence trying to destroy mankind in the near future." Schmidt went on to say, "It's a movie. The state of the earth currently does not support any of these scenarios."

That could mean swooping in to grab a piece of an undervalued technology company trading on the stock exchange or doing a large-scale private equity deal. That's because investing in technology start-ups is usually constrained by the sector's ability to absorb large sums, with $1 billion generally considered the very upper limit. In the parlance of finance, money does not scale. These bankers say that the fund -- which has $45 billion from Saudi Arabia, $25 billion from SoftBank and smaller contributions from Apple, Lawrence Ellison of Oracle and others -- will also be looking at smaller venture capital forays in artificial intelligence, robotics and financial technology. But given the fund's size, the major bets will be on large companies.

A huge telescope in Chile is going to be modified so that it can look for aliens. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope will be altered so that it can better look for potentially habitable and habited planets in Alpha Centauri, the star system that is closest to Earth. The modifications are part of a deal between the ESO and Breakthrough Starshot, a huge venture that eventually hopes to send out tiny spacecraft deep into space, among other projects. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

Multiple weaknesses were exposed in public institutions in connection with last year's election. First, cybercriminals tried to hack the outcome, then pollsters failed to read voter sentiment accurately. Finally, fake news crept into our news feeds, distorting our collective view of the real world. Can big data technology and artificial intelligence put us back on the straight and narrow? We'll soon get to find out.

India-based HDFC Bank is about to introduce its first "humanoid" branch assistant – Ira. The human-sized robot was built together with artificial intelligence (AI) company Asimov Robotics. HDFC says there are plans to bring more robots to its branches, depending on customer feedback. Ira is part of a broader AI focus at HDFC, which the bank unveiled last year. The bank is calling on fintech firms, including start-ups, to get in touch with ideas on virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), internet of things (IoT) and rural banking tech.

The McDonald's on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn't look all that different from any of the fast-food chain's other locations across the country. Inside, however, hungry patrons are welcomed not by a cashier waiting to take their order, but by a "Create Your Taste" kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being. It's impossible to say exactly how many jobs have been lost by the deployment of the automated kiosks – McDonald's has been predictably reluctant to release numbers – but such innovations will be an increasingly familiar sight in Trump's America. Once confined to the pages of futuristic dystopian fictions, the field of robotics promises to be the most profoundly disruptive technological shift since the industrial revolution. While robots have been utilized in several industries, including the automotive and manufacturing sectors, for decades, experts now predict that a tipping point in robotic deployments is imminent – and that much of the developed world simply isn't prepared for such a radical transition.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas has become the best place to learn about what's coming to cars. This year, however, the wild new capabilities rolling through CES, and into the auto industry, went from an open secret to headline grabbing news. As a result, it was an incredible week for us. Since we unveiled our AI computing platform for autonomous vehicles at CES last year, DRIVE PX 2 has become the core of the AI revolution sweeping the auto industry. That became clear with the show's opening keynote Wednesday from NVIDIA Co-Founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who announced our new AI Co-Pilot for the car built on DRIVE PX 2, as well as our ever expanding AI Car ecosystem of partners.