To find out what people think of lady dancing, you don't need to head to the club. Instead, researchers in the UK outfitted female dancers with motion capture rigs, much like the ones that bring digital movie characters like Gollum or Jar Jar Binks to life. According to science, then, women who swing their hips while moving their legs and thighs independently are rated high on attractiveness. In this study, published Thursday, the authors showed the digitized dance avatars to a group of heterosexual men and women. The basic mannequin-like animations allowed the researchers to control for any secondary variables that might denote hotness like clothing or hairstyle.

A study by a British think tank, Reform, says that 90% of British civil service workers have jobs so pointless, they could easily be replaced by robots, saving the government around $8 billion per year. The study, published this week, says that robots are "more efficient" at collecting data, processing paperwork, and doing the routine tasks that now fall to low-level government employees. Even nurses and doctors, who are government employees in the UK, could be relieved of some duties by mechanical assistants. There are "few complex roles" in civil service, it seems, that require a human being to handle. "Twenty percent of public-sector workers hold strategic, 'cognitive' roles," Reform's press release on the study says.

The world's first Cybathlon, a single-day sporting competition designed for people with severe disabilities, was a massive success in 2016. We documented the games, tech and cheering crowds that filled Zürich's Swiss Arena in a five-part video series -- and in 2020, we'll have the chance to do it all again. The Cybathlon will officially return in May 2020 as a two-day event in Zürich. The Cybathlon 2020 will include the six disciplines from 2016 -- Brain-Computer Interface Race, FES Bike Race, Powered Arm Prosthesis Race, Powered Leg Prosthesis Race, Powered Exoskeleton Race and Powered Wheelchair Race -- plus new challenges, including some for people with sensory disabilities such as deafness and blindness. The games are a chance for participants to prove their strength and resolve, and they offer a stage for biomedical companies to demonstrate their recent advances in research.

Should I stay or should I go? An LED display for driverless cars aims to give pedestrians at a crossing the power to communicate with vehicles, signalling for the vehicles to stop or drive on. Blink, created by researchers at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, turns the awkward dance of eye contact and hand gestures that happens when a car slows down while someone is waiting to cross the road into something driverless cars could understand. The Blink design integrates an organic light-emitting diode display into the windscreen and rear window of the car and uses light signals to show pedestrians when the car is aware of their presence. If the car's sensors detect a pedestrian nearby, a figure lights up that mirrors their movements, accompanied by a bleep.

The same type of artificial intelligence that mastered the ancient game of Go could help wrestle with the amazing complexity of quantum systems containing billions of particles. Google's AlphaGo artificial neural network made headlines last year when it bested a world champion at Go. After marvelling at this feat, Giuseppe Carleo of ETH Zurich in Switzerland thought it might be possible to build a similar machine-learning tool to crack one of the knottiest problems in quantum physics. Now, he has built just such a neural network – which could turn out to be a game changer in understanding quantum systems. Go is far more complex than chess, in that the number of possible positions on a Go board could exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

The result is a large robotic pollinator described in the journal Chem. In addition to putting together the remote-controlled pollinating drone, Miyako and colleagues also tested the gel on ants, and found that ants with a small coating of the gel attracted more pollen than ants without. Miyako's experiment was inspired by the plight of pollinators like bees around the globe, many of which are currently imperiled by a wide variety of factors. Dave Goulson, a biologist who specializes in the study of bumblebees, says that a combination of factors are leading to the declining health of bee populations worldwide. "The poor bees are short of food, poisoned by pesticides and infected with foreign diseases. There are a few other minor things as well, but you stick all that together and it's hardly surprising that they're not doing so great," Goulson says.

Digital health startups looking to solve the pharma industry's problems will be heartened to hear that German life sciences company Bayer is bringing its Grants4Apps accelerator program to San Francisco. That announcement came from Dirk Schapeler, head of Bayer's Lifescience iHub, who was speaking at the Wearable Tech Digital Health Neurotech Silicon Valley conference at Stanford University, Tuesday. Bayer's Lifescience iHub is based in Mountain View, California, and is aimed at infusing the digital component in all of Bayer's businesses including pharmaceuticals through collaboration with tech companies. As such the company is interested in sensors, AI, machine learning and digital apps. Grant4Apps is Bayer's accelerator for digital health startups worldwide.

In 2016 there was a lot of talk about chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI). As CarTrawler's Bob Healey bluntly puts it in an interview last month: "People are now sick of hearing about AI and bots, so I think they'll actually start doing something in that space rather than just talking about it." Putting it a little more gently, is Swapnil Shinde, CEO and co-founder of Mezi, an AI-powered personal travel assistant app which allows users to interact using natural language. "AI-driven chatbots have made massive headway over the last year and we expect this to continue into 2017 as the technology becomes mainstream," he says. What many travel businesses applied chatbots to last year was the handling of sales and customer service through messaging apps like Facebook Messenger.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

According to analyst Forrester, AI, big data and analytics will increase businesses' access to data, broaden the types of data that can be analysed, and raise the level of sophistication of the resulting insight. Read about the new best practices for the ERP systems and how to tackle the growth of ERP integrations. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.