After 90 days and 288,000 working hours, the much-discussed fourth annual Data Science Bowl has ended. Run by Booz Allen Hamilton and Kaggle, the contest resulted in 68,000 algorithms, 3 winners, and one tantalizing opportunity for biomedical research. The goal of this year's Data Science Bowl was to build artificial intelligence (AI) systems that could automate what organizers called a "critical component of biomedical research." As such, 18,000 competitors spent months honing deep-learning models to scrutinize images of cells in search of nuclei, all without aid from humans. The ensuing algorithms are expected to salvage hundreds of thousands of hours each year, time that was previously burned by researchers who were forced to perform the task, according to the organizers.

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in our daily use of artificial intelligence. Nowadays, AI systems are being used in leading newsrooms around the world. I recently detailed AI's current roles in journalism, and the new possibilities they present. With these new possibilities come questions regarding ethical use of AI in newsrooms and the factors that should be considered when judging the moral application of AI in today's news. Here, we're going to examine the emerging ethics surrounding AI use in journalism as media professionals face new challenges never before met in the modern newsroom.

Without this context, sensors find it very difficult to identify emotions. This is because people use different strategies to conceal unpleasant feelings such as shame; they may withdraw from the conversation or distract from the emotion in question. We currently resort to a trick in order to see through this pattern: we have designed the interview dialogue such that we know the precise point at which a sense of shame is normally provoked. One challenge for our future research is to be able to detect such emotions at any time. The training environment may also prove useful for other applications at a later date, for example when it comes to the rehabilitation of patients suffering from neuro-psychological conditions.

Imagine you're back in the olden days. A new farming technology has just been released and everyone is raising their eyebrows and muttering skepticisms under their breath. Fast forward a few more years and a new mechanical sewing contraption has just hit the market (you might know it as a sewing machine, though in its crudest form). Rather than being welcomed with open arms, workers in Elizabethan England were deeply concerned it would mark the end of their careers. And, if you were alive in the 1920s, the notion of things like MTV or an air traffic controller would have been completely mindboggling.

If you're unhappy with other players or the results of a raid, don't take it out on the game's servers, or you could wind up in a US jail. Take it from Calin Mateias, a 38-year-old Romanian man who was just sentenced to one year in federal prison for launching a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against "World of Warcraft's" European servers in 2010. According to the US Department of Justice, Mateias launched the attacks between February and September 2010 after clashing with other WoW players for a variety of reasons, including the division of loot and membership in raid teams. His attacks were successful, causing WoW servers to crash and preventing some paying users from being able to access the game. Mateias was indicted in 2011 and has been in custody since Nov. 20 after being extradited from Romania. He pleaded guilty in February to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.

Time to start hoping a robot takes that emergency call. When it comes to spotting signs of cardiac arrest, artificial intelligence is beating humans. New Scientist first covered Copenhagen-based artificial intelligence company Corti earlier this year. Its AI was being trialled in Denmark to listen in on emergency calls in real-time. It searches for patterns of communication, including features like tone of voice and breathing sounds.

We know spiders best as quiet, eight-legged monsters who lurk around and trap their prey with webs and venom. Terrifying as it is, the way these spiders jump is worth studying. They can leap six times the distance of their body length from a standing start (humans can only manage a paltry 1.5 times their own length), and carry five times their weight into the air. Translating these physiological wonders into engineering strategies could revolutionize the type of robots we build and deploy--though hopefully not ones that lunge at human prey. A team of researchers from the University of Manchester in the UK ran a study that trained a regal jumping spider (Phidippus regius) named Kim to jump across various distances of a platformed obstacle course, all while ultra-high-speed videos took footage of the leaps.

Self-driving vehicles will "inevitably" reach Ireland within years, the man behind a global tech conference has said. Philip McNamara said that the technology was 40 times safer than manual driving and it was only a matter of time before people backed the industry. The MobilityX conference in Dublin tomorrow will focus on self-driving cars. "I live in San Francisco and there's hundreds of self-driving cars that are on the streets every day," Mr McNamara, originally from Galway, said. "I think it's inevitable that they will be over here in a few years' time.

The roughly €19 billion deal would face a possibly lengthy European Union antitrust review, but if completed, would create one of the continent's biggest telecommunications operators, selling the industry's holy grail "quad-play" package: cable, internet, wireless and landline-phone service on a single bill. The Financial Times reported earlier Tuesday the two companies were nearing a deal. The deal would represent the latest in a global trend of wireless carriers acquiring cable operations, or vice versa, to offer quad-play packages. Wireless carriers need high-speed cable networks to quickly transmit data to cellular towers for 5G, the coming generation of mobile networks that promise to be fast enough to enable near-instantaneous movie downloads and innovations such as self-driving cars. Both companies have said they have engaged in various forms of merger talks with each other in recent years.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI), and with good reason. AI now does simple tasks like playing games. But it also helps pilots fly planes, which is a big reason why we haven't seen a growth in the number of commercial airplane tragedies despite an increasing number of flights. As AI does more complex tasks, it will transform economies, industries and our everyday lives. It will also raise questions about its impact on our economy and jobs.