On cold, dark days it is tempting to imagine shutting yourself away until the warmer weather returns. Many animals do it by entering a state known as torpor, which reduces their bodily functions to a minimum and uses fat stores in their body for energy, but could humans ever hibernate in the same way? Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford has explained what torpor does to the body and how it could affect the human body in an article for The Conversation. An expert has explained what torpor - or the act of shutting the body down during hibernation - does to the body and how it could affect humans. A'therapeutic torpor' could make a manned mission to Mars more feasible.

It has been put to good use by comic book superheroes and by alien predators hell-bent on wiping out mankind, but soon humans could also be able to see infrared light. Scientists have used brain implants to give rats a'sixth-sense' that enables them to detect and react to the normally invisible light source. The research proves it is possible for the adult brain to adapt to new forms of input and opens up the possibility of enabling humans to gain an array of superhuman senses. Scientists have connected infrared sensors to the brains of rats using electrical implants to allow the rodents to detect the normally invisible light. They found the rats were able to spot infrared light and react to it by pressing a button beneath an infrared source to get food. Researchers say it may be possible to attach sensors for other forms of light such as ultraviolet, microwaves and even x-rays using brain implants.

Google's Boston Dynamics is up for sale - and could be sold to Amazon or Toyota, it has been revealed. The firm is best known for Atlas, its 5 foot 9 humanoid robot, and spot, a four legged'dog robot'. Boston Dynamic has revealed the new wireless version of its humanoid robot in a new video showing it walk, run, and even be pushed over and get up again on its own. According to Boston Dynamics, Atlas is a'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. 'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment.

Instead, the Japanese gaming giant is looking to its legions of cutesy avatars. Nintendo has launched the'Miitomo' app in Japan featuring customisable characters called Miis. The avatars can be created with the app using a smartphone camera and then fitted with virtual clothes and quizzed by other Miis. The avatars can be created with the app using a smartphone camera and then fitted with virtual clothes and quizzed by other Miis. 'Miitomo' - 'tomo' meaning'friend' in Japanese - is scheduled to come to the US and other markets later this year, but Nintendo has yet to announce a release date'Miitomo' - 'tomo' meaning'friend' in Japanese - is scheduled to come to the US and other markets later this year, but Nintendo has yet to announce a release date.

A firm has just unveiled a new family of futuristic suits that give wearers the ability to lift with near superhuman strength and walk great distances without stopping to rest. Panasonic's line of'Iron Man' exoskeletons are designed to assist industrial workers and sportsmen. The Assist Suit AWN-03 gives you the power to repeatedly pick up hefty items without straining your back and the PLN-01 'NINJA' helps you get over the roughest terrain and not break a sweat. Last year, the firm showed a mega exoskeleton resembles the Power Loader exoskeleton suit from the Alien movies (pictured). It had four embedded sensors that would trigger 20 engines, which would reduce human energy.

Ishiguro does not expect the average household to buy a Geminoid -- in part because of the 100,000 price tag -- but he already has some orders from researchers. He does expect his smaller CommU communicative robots to make their way inside many households within the next couple of years. Like Amazon's Echo -- but much cuter -- these chatty robots use voice recognition technology and artificial intelligence to simulate conversation. An example of where they can be useful is in tutoring, said Ishiguro. Many Japanese learners struggle with speaking English because they do not get enough practice.

I was lucky enough to represent ACM and ACM-W at the recent Ada Lovelace Symposium at Oxford University, celebrating her 200th birthday. I participated in a panel "Enchantress of Abstraction and Bride of Science: can women scientists escape being icons, role-models and heroines." Why do so many current organizations and events identify with and recognize Ada Lovelace? We are well into the 21st century; Ada was born 200 years ago. Why do so many women today seem to look to her as a model and icon?

Suresh Venkatasubramanian of the University of Utah presented a method for finding disparate impact in algorithms last year at the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. If you have ever searched for hotel rooms online, you have probably had this experience: surf over to another website to read a news story and the page fills up with ads for travel sites, offering deals on hotel rooms in the city you plan to visit. Buy something on Amazon, and ads for similar products will follow you around the Web. The practice of profiling people online means companies get more value from their advertising dollars and users are more likely to see ads that interest them. The practice has a downside, though, when the profiling is based on sensitive attributes, such as race, sex, or sexual orientation.

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game. While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them. Socher, now CEO of machine learning developer MetaMind, did not intend his remarks to be construed as a comparison of Watson to the academic model he and his colleagues built. As an illustration of the new technical and cultural landscape around NLP, however, the laughter Socher's comment drew was an acknowledgment that basic and applied research in language processing is no longer the exclusive province of those with either deep pockets or strictly academic intentions. Indeed, new tools and new techniques--particularly open source technologies such as Google's word2vec neural text processing tool--combined with steady increases in computing power, have broadened the potential for natural language processing far beyond the research lab or supercomputer.

In a world with more mobile phones than flush toilets, digital devices are now standard equipment among even the world's poorest and most remote people. Farmers in these areas are getting tools for their devices that help deliver water, nutrients, and medicine to plants as needed; test for crop diseases and malnourishment; and survey their soil for future planning. In some cases, these emerging apps are the biggest new technologies resource-poor farms have seen in hundreds of years. That is not very surprising to Rajiv "Raj" Khosla, professor of Precision Agriculture at the College of Agricultural Sciences of Colorado State University. "What we're finding is that many small-scale farmers in resource-poor environments are still farming in the 1500s. They're looking for leapfrog technologies," he said.