A new study suggests that common settings used in software for analyzing brain scans may lead to false positive results. Researchers led by Anders Eklund, an electrical engineer at Linköping University in Sweden, analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from several public databases. Certain software settings, the team found, could give rise to a false positive result up to 70% of the time. In the context of a typical fMRI experiment, that could lead researchers to wrongly conclude that activity in a certain area of the brain plays a role in a cognitive function such as perception or memory.

The hot new trend in self-learning algorithms--a technology that's embedded in our phones, our social networks, and more--is trying to figure out how the hell it works. The thing is that the algorithms known as neural networks are essentially black boxes. We've developed the high-level concepts that govern them and designed the networks themselves, but picking apart decisions that they make on their own is intensely difficult due to their internal complexity. As impressive as these systems are, however, they're not perfect, and to make them better we need to understand what makes them tick. The latest attempt at tearing the top off of a computational black box was published to the ArXiv preprint server this week by researchers at the Queen Mary University of London in the UK. They took a peek inside how a neural network understands music genres.

Artificial intelligence is disrupting everything from board games to the betting industry--but how about one of the world's oldest beverages? London-based IntelligentX is the world's first firm to brew beer with the help of artificial intelligence. The startup is using an algorithm called Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI) to collect customer feedback data through a Facebook Messenger bot in order to improve the recipes of its beer. "Over the last six months we've iterated the algorithm and improving the algorithm and improving the beers," Hew Leith, co-founder of IntelligentX, tells Newsweek. Four beers have been created to date--Golden AI, Amber AI, Pale AI and Black AI--all of which are brewed along the Bermondsey Beer Mile in London.

Ducklings are among the most adorable creatures on the planet, but the fluffy baby birds are probably most well-known for the way they unquestionably follow their mothers. But it seems that baby mallards are more intelligent than had been previously realised, according to a recent study. Recently-hatched ducklings can understand the concepts of'same' and'different' - an ability previously known in only highly intelligent animals, new research has shown. Ducklings are one of the most adorable animals, and the furry little birds are probably most well-known for the cute way they follow their mothers, not for their intelligence. Ducklings learn to follow their mother through a learning process called imprinting, where they identify and begin to follow the first thing they see.

People across the world are turning amateur photos into elaborate works of art with a new viral app that relies on AI technology to let users instantly transform mundane images into Picasso paintings. Prisma, an app that has attracted 1 million daily users as of Thursday, is reinventing the concept of filtering photos with technology. While the concept of adding filters to photos has been around for years, the Prisma iOS app is unique in the way that it relies on a "combination of neural networks and artificial intelligence" to remake the image. What that means is the Prisma tools aren't the kind of art filters that Instagram uses where the filters overlay the original photo. Instead, Prisma goes through different layers and recreates the photo from scratch, according to the app makers, who are based in Moscow.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Banks of the future will stop selling customers products they don't need and will focus on doing one product well, according to Starling Banks' Anne Boden. Speaking at WIRED Money 2016, Boden said: "Nowadays, we have the big banks with lots of products with lots of customer groups and lots of different channels trying to own the whole experience. "I don't believe a startup bank can beat big banks. You need to focus and do one thing really well; 20 times better than everyone else to give people a reason to bank with you." Starling is a challenger bank building data-driven current accounts controlled from smartphones. It was created in January 2014 and is due to launch within the next three months. In January this year, it received 70 million ( 48 million) in investment. Prior to founding Starling, Boden was CEO of Allied Irish Banks and head of Emea, global transaction banking across 34 countries for RBS and ABN AMRO. She has more than 30 years' experience in banking, having begun her career at Lloyds Bank, before moving on to Standard Chartered Bank and then UBS in Zurich. "I took a year out recently to discuss what is happening in the banking industry," added Boden. "I spent time talking to people involved in Fintech and a lot of the things I took for granted, and that I thought were a given, weren't true at all.

A team of researchers has created an anonymity network methodology that they believe is more efficient and more secure than existing anonymous networks such as Tor. The research team consists of computer science researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The anonymity architecture uses a routing protocol known as a net network, or mixnet, to make it difficult to trace communications. "Each server permutes the order in which it receives messages before passing them on to the next," according to a statement describing the secure network method. The researchers will present details of the network, named Riffle, at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Germany next week.

So, you bought into the current machine learning craze and went on to collect millions/billions of records from this promising new data source. Now, what do you do with them? Too often, the abundance of data quickly turns into an abundance of problems. How do you extract that "magic essence" from your data without falling into the common pitfalls? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Natalia Ponomareva, Software Engineer at Google, provided tips on how to be successful in large scale machine learning.

In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for artificial intelligence (A.I.) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) allows anyone from ambitious amateur coders to advanced computer scientists to build and test artificial intelligence in the "Minecraft" environment. "We?re trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions," Katja Hofmann, the project's lead researcher, said in a Microsoft blog post announcing the release.