Presbyterian reverend Thomas Bayes had no reason to suspect he'd make any lasting contribution to humankind. Born in England at the beginning of the 18th century, Bayes was a quiet and questioning man. He published only two works in his lifetime. In 1731, he wrote a defense of God's--and the British monarchy's--"divine benevolence," and in 1736, an anonymous defense of the logic of Isaac Newton's calculus. Yet an argument he wrote before his death in 1761 would shape the course of history.

Are we headed towards a world where machines do everything? Will people be left on the sidelines, queuing for handouts and hungering for meaningful work? These are questions at the heart of Techonomy's mission and the conversations we're curating now. An amazing breakfast roundtable on AI at the recent Techonomy conference surfaced a typically astonishing diversity of ideas about where it's going. My own view remains cautiously optimistic that the net effect of automation will not fundamentally be to destroy jobs. But the future is complex.

At some point in the course of pregnancy, a woman is likely to suspect that the baby she is incubating has somehow hijacked her brain. New research suggests that, in some sense, she's right, and that pregnancy itself is altering her brain like no other experience she's had since adolescence. The places where a pregnant woman's brain shrinks are very specific, the research says. The structural renovations wrought by pregnancy appear to overlap almost perfectly with the brain regions that play a key role in how we understand and interpret the actions, intentions and feelings of others. And the brain of a first-time mother stays changed -- for at least two years after she has given birth, according to the new research, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Pregnant women did not lose intellectual ground, the researchers found: as a group, their working memory and memory for words was no better or worse than before pregnancy.

Recently found a post by Ali Syed on topic; "Europeans unconvinced by big data in general". This study was conducted for the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications by Kantar-owned market researchers TNS Infratest. It analyses over 8,000 individuals across eight European countries and offers valuable insight into people's perceptions of big data and analytics Still there are people or groups don't believe that we are living in the age of Big Data. Other way round we can say they think Big Data is just a hype created by technology people. To me the concept of Big Data is not new.

What is common between Analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Internet of Things (IoT)? Are those two lines too little to be self-explanatory? Let me expand on this. The connected world today has upwards of 6 billion devices that are linked to each other via the internet superhighway. The number is expected to grow close to 75 billion by 2020 as per a recent Morgan Stanley report.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are two of Hollywood's most charming on-screen presences, and they trade on that star quality for as long as they can in "Passengers." Unfortunately, that turns out to be not long enough. Sweet but inconsequential at its best, overly contrived at most other times, "Passengers" takes too long to get to its too inevitable plot points to truly entertain. All that is especially frustrating because not only does "Passengers" have those two appealing performers, it has a fine director in Morten Tyldum, an engaging visual look and a premise that seems to offer potential audience enjoyment. But even Tyldum, responsible for the excellent "The Imitation Game" as well as "Headhunters" in his native Norway, has been unable to genuinely ignite a science fiction story that sounds better in outline than it plays out in detail. Basically a "Dating Game" version of Robinson Crusoe with some unsurprising outer space jeopardy thrown in, "Passengers" wonders what would happen if two attractive people found themselves the only folks unfortunately awake and active on a spaceship hurtling into the future.

Dyson's 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner has finally been released in the UK after an extensive trial in Japan and it claims to be the best available. How does it stack up against the market leading Roomba – and is it really worth buying? The 360 Eye is both smaller and taller than most other robot vacuums. It's 23cm in diameter, which is 12cm less than its biggest competitor, the iRobot Roomba 900 series, but it's also 12cm tall, which makes it 3cm taller than the Roomba. Docked, as it spends most of its time, the 360 Eye takes up significantly less floor space than wider competitors, which makes it easier to live with, and its smaller diameter means it can also get into and out of tighter gaps.

The year 2016 was supposed to be when the tech bubble finally burst. Instead the world blew up. Amid Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, the dominance of a handful of technology companies over society became increasingly obvious – from Facebook's troubling impact on democracy to Elon Musk's plan to colonize a new planet before we destroy this one. Still, if there's one thing we can learn from this year in technology, it's that no matter how bad things get, someone in Silicon Valley will make money off it. The social network continued its relentless campaign to swallow the internet whole, racking up almost $6bn in profit in the first three quarters of the year and soaring to 1.79 billion monthly active users.

The basic of neuronal networks are neurons. Neurons consists of a cell body, dendrites and axons. Neurons ceaselessly scan their environment for chemical gradients and for other neurons to connect. If a neuron cannot connect to other neurons it dies (no worries, we produce daily around 80'000 new neurons, no matter how old we are). The scanning is nothing else as the growing of the axons.

The Reinventing Energy Summit, hosted by New Scientist and Re.Work, occurred on November 25th in London, UK. Good Faith Energy president and founder, Mohammed Abdalla, was in attendance at the conference to gain insights on the future of renewable energy and new technologies. The event's goal was to together energy thought-leaders, policy experts, innovative startups, utility companies, and world-class academics, to explore the advancement of technologies impacting renewable energy. A record £15.2bn was invested in UK clean energy in 2015. Favorable incentives and subsidies have led to this enormous growth.