Spotify is looking to make people better, as well as more entertained. The company has launched a new partnership with Headspace, an app meant to help people live "healthier and happier lives". In the new deal, people will be able to suscribe to both of the services for a reduced price. Together, the two apps will sell for £14.99 -- or roughly the same price in other currencies -- rather than the £10 or so that each of them costs. A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

It may seem illogical, but letting the water flow between your fingers is the most effective way to swim. In what experts admit seems to go against common sense, spreading the fingers was found to be up to five per cent more efficient than keeping the fingers together. What scientists call the'rake' style is more efficient than the'paddle' or'closed' approach. Scientists believe they have cracked the secret to the perfect swimming stroke. Scientists from the Eindhoven University of Technology and colleagues found that spreading fingers increases the drag of the hand through the water.

Google has agreed a five-year deal with one of the largest NHS trusts to handle the medical records of up to 1.6million people. The tech giant's secretive DeepMind health business will use the data to help develop a mobile app they claim could save 10,000 lives a year. In 2017 it will launch a warning system for acute kidney problems and blood poisoning at three London hospitals, although its'Streams' app will also include test results, medical history and an instant messaging service. But it is hugely controversial because the Royal Free London NHS Trust has agreed that DeepMind needs to be given all patient data to make it work. This is believed to include patients' names, ages, and complete medical histories, including whether they had been diagnosed with HIV, depression, suffered from drug or alcohol addiction, or had an abortion.

If you haven't had a ding, you've probably had a job squeezing yourself out of your car, pushing limbs through the door like an octopus escaping an aquarium. At its worst, car parking can be a trial of stress and bodily contortion. A vehicular obesity epidemic is reportedly putting a strain on the nation's multistoreys, where accidents are on the rise. According to Accident Exchange, a courtesy-car firm, there are now almost 2,000 parking prangs a day. Cars are growing, thanks to the addition of safety features and our demands for more space, but, like airline seats, parking spaces are not keeping up.

Would you trust an artificial intelligence to fly an armed combat jet? Software called ALPHA is being used to fly uncrewed jets in simulations and could one day help pilots in real-world missions. ALPHA's developers claim, that unlike many AI systems, its behaviour can be verified at each step, meaning it won't act unpredictably. ALPHA was developed by Psibernetix in Ohio as a training aid for the US air force. It was originally designed to fly aircraft in a virtual air combat simulator, but has now been turned into a friendly co-pilot system that can help human pilots using the simulator.

Google's DeepMind has announced a five-year agreement with a UK National Health Service (NHS) trust that will give it access to patient data to develop and deploy its healthcare app, Streams. The new partnership follows an earlier agreement, the details of which New Scientist first revealed in April, which generated concerns over the amount and nature of data made available to DeepMind. The Streams app is designed to deliver an alert about a patient's condition to a doctor's or nurse's cellphone in a similar way to getting a news notification. It will initially be used from 2017 to spot people at risk of kidney problems, but is due to be expanded over the five years to include other functions such as detecting blood poisoning and coordinating patient treatment. DeepMind is working on the project with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals.

Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, among other technology companies, have been investing heavily in artificial intelligence and related disciplines like machine learning because they see the technology enabling services that become a source of revenue. Consultancy Accenture earlier this week quantified this enthusiasm, predicting that AI "could double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine" and by boosting labor productivity by 40 per cent. Certainly things could work out well for Accenture, which a day later announced a partnership with Google to help companies deploy Google technology like machine learning. It's as if the global services firm has a stake in the future it foresees. But the machine learning algorithms underpinning this harmonious union of people and circuits aren't secure. In a paper [PDF] presented in August at the 25th Annual Usenix Security Symposium, researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Cornell University, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that machine learning models can be stolen and that basic security measures don't really mitigate attacks.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and Carnegie Mellon University held the first part of the two-part joint Carnegie Colloquium on Digital Governance and Security in Washington D.C. on Oct. 31. The first part of the colloquium was titled "The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Military Operations and Privacy," and the second part, titled "The Future of the Internet: Governance and Conflict," will be held this year in Pittsburgh on Dec. 2. CEIP is a series of foreign policy-based research centers located in Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States, with headquarters in Washington D.C., that collects itself under the phrase, "The Global Think Tank." It was established in 1960 by Andrew Carnegie and, according to a report by the University of Pennsylvania, is the third most influential think tank in the world. The colloquium, held for the benefit of both Carnegie Mellon and the CEIP, aimed to allow for communication between the academics at Carnegie Mellon and the foreign policy and ethics experts from all the CEIP stations across the world to discuss the implication of artificial intelligence on foreign policy and the challenges posed by it. The second part of the colloquium will focus on cyber-security norms and internet governance. "Designing safe software systems and attempting to create the learning abilities of the human brain are natural progressions towards the two of the modern world's most pressing concerns -- cyber security and privacy," said President Subra Suresh, in the welcome address.

Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust have announced a fresh five-year collaboration today, which will see the former's DeepMind AI used to improve patient care across the trust's various hospital sites. The partnership will focus on Streams, a mobile app the pair have been working on since late last year that's been approved as a medical device by the UK's health regulator. DeepMind will analyse blood test results as they come in and flag when patients might be at risk of acute kidney injury, proactively alerting carers through the Streams app. It'll go live across the trust in early 2017, and there are plans to expand the blood analysis to look for signs of sepsis and other causes of organ failure. The pair hope to add messaging and task management features over the course of the collaboration too, and Streams is said to be built on open standards that will allow other developers to easily add new services.

As car makers outfit their vehicles with more autonomous features, insurance providers are carefully weighing up how to cover owners of driverless cars while figuring out exactly who should be liable in an accident. The UK government agrees it's a major priority and has already laid down a common-sense framework to guide discussions, but the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has today published a specific list of rules that providers believe will best protect everyone involved. Insurers are asking for a "basic set of core data" that will be shared in the event of an accident. It will tell them whether a car was operating in autonomous mode or being driven manually and indicate which features were in use at the time. Information would also include the time and GPS location of an incident, when the vehicle was placed into driverless mode and when the driver last interacted with it (including steering and braking), as well as whether there was someone in the driver's seat and whether their seatbelt was secured.