This is the moment a robotic dog tries its metal paws at herding unruly sheep on a farm in New Zealand. Spot gathered together the animals before pushing them through the field, with the help of two biological sheepdogs. Developed by Boston Dynamics, it can reach speeds of up to 3mph and costs less than a car, which average £30,000, to lease, according to reports. It has been heralded as the future of farming. The robot was seen helping the dogs to keep the sheep together.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs today that he is confident that the government will have recruited 25,000 coronavirus contact tracers by the start of June, which he says will provide the capacity to trace the contacts of 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Johnson said 24,000 contact tracers have already been recruited. In April, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government hoped to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May, to coincide with the planned release of the NHS covid-19 contact tracing app. But the widespread release of the app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight, has now been delayed until June. There are also ongoing concerns about privacy. In a recent report, security researchers wrote that there should be a legal requirement that all data collected by the app is deleted at the end of the coronavirus crisis, rather than being anonymised or repurposed.

Yesterday, Microsoft's Build 2020 developer conference kicked off (remotely), and we saw the first results of Microsoft's billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk. Microsoft announced it has developed an Azure-hosted supercomputer built expressly for testing OpenAI's large-scale artificial intelligence models. While we've seen many AI implementations focused on single tasks, like recognizing specific objects in images or translating languages, a new wave of research focuses on massive models that can perform multiple tasks at once. As Microsoft notes, that can include moderating game streams or potentially generating code after exploring GitHub. Realistically, these large-scale models can actually make AI a lot more useful for consumers and developers alike.

Zebra Medical Vision, the deep-learning medical imaging analytics company, announced on Monday that it secured its 5th FDA clearance, this time for an AI solution that identifies findings suggestive of compression fractures in scans. The Israeli firm said the FDA gave 510(k) clearance for its Vertebral Compression Fractures (VCF) product that enables clinicians to place patients at risk of osteoporosis "in treatment pathways to prevent potentially life-changing fractures," Zebra Medical said in a statement. The solution can be applied to abdominal or chest CT scan performed for any clinical indication, the company says. Founded in 2014 by Eyal Toledano, Eyal Gura, and Elad Benjamin, Zebra uses AI to read medical scans and automatically detect anomalies. Through its development and use of different algorithms, Zebra Medical has been able to identify visual symptoms for diseases such as breast cancer, osteoporosis, and fatty liver, as well as conditions such as aneurysms and brain bleeds.

By Equipment the market for lab automation is segmented into automated liquid handlers, automated plate handlers, robotic arm, automated storage and retrieval systems. By software the lab automation market is segmented into laboratory information management system, laboratory information system, chromatography data system, electronic lab notebook, scientific data management system. On the basis of analyzer the market is segmented into biochemistry analyzers, immuno-based analyzers, hematology analyzers segments. By application the segmentation of the market is drug discovery, genomics, proteomics, protein engineering, bio analysis, analytical chemistry, system biology, clinical diagnostics, lyophilization. Based on end user the lab automation market is segmented into biotechnology & pharmaceuticals, hospitals, research institutions, academics, private labs. On the basis of geography, lab automation market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.

UK government advised to'urgently' build up contact tracing capacity The UK House of Commons science and technology committee has made recommendations to the government based on evidence from its on-going inquiry into the role of science in the country's pandemic response. These include a call for the government to "urgently" build up capacity for contact tracing. The committee also recommended that the government be more transparent about the scientific advice it receives, asking that the published list of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) members be updated regularly. They also suggested the government set out a plan for tackling infections spread by people who do not have any covid-19 symptoms, and called for the systematic recording of the ethnicity of everyone who dies from the disease. The committee also urged the government to publish its rationale for concentrating coronavirus testing in a limited number of Public Health England laboratories, rather than making ...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia are compiling CT scans and chest X-rays from around the world to create a global dataset aimed at helping physicians determine the best treatment courses for people with COVID-19. Thanks to a partnership with Amazon Web Services, the UBC team is sharing its data online for free, with the goal of helping in the battle against the novel coronavirus by using predictive modelling to better diagnose the severity of the disease and improve treatment. Radiology resident Dr. William Parker and his research partner Dr. Savvas Nicolaou, a professor of radiology at UBC and the director of emergency and trauma radiology at Vancouver General Hospital, began collecting CT images from colleagues in multiple countries in January. They developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to better identify the percentage of lung tissue involvement and the subtle patterns of infection documented in the CT scans and what that indicates about how a patient may fare in the long run. Developing a better understanding of how the virus presents in CT images will help doctors identify which patients "will do better to go home and self-isolate and which ones may need more support, like ventilation and ICU admission," Parker told CTV's Your Morning on Friday.

To prove just how useful Spot, Boston Dynamics' four-legged robot dog, can be, the New Zealand-based robotics company Rocos shared a video of Spot herding sheep across grassy pastures. This is the kind of work Rocos hopes to do as part of a partnership, announced today, with Boston Dynamics. Rocos plans to develop a system that will remotely manage Spot and automate fleets so that they can function independently. In addition to herding sheep, Spot robots might also harvest crops, inspect yields or create real-time maps, Rocos says. These capabilities are all possible now that Spot is more nimble, can handle rugged terrain and can carry infrared and LiDAR cameras.

The magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic will largely depend on how quickly safe and effective vaccines and treatments can be developed and tested. Many assume a widely available vaccine is years away, if ever. Others believe that a 12- to 18-month development cycle is a given. Our best bet to reduce even that record-breaking timeline is by using artificial intelligence. The problem is twofold: discovering the right set of molecules among billions of possibilities, and then waiting for clinical trials. These processes ordinarily take several years, but AI holds the key to radically shortening both.

Emergency managers receive communication training about the importance of being 'first, right and credible', and taking into account the psychology of their audience and their particular reasoning under stress and risk. But we believe that citizens should be similarly trained about how to deal with risk communication. In particular, such messages necessarily carry a part of uncertainty since most natural risks are difficult to accurately forecast ahead of time. Yet, citizens should keep trusting the emergency communicators even after they made forecasting errors in the past. We have designed a serious game called Vigiflood, based on a real case study of flash floods hitting the South West of France in October 2018. In this game, the user changes perspective by taking the role of an emergency communicator, having to set the level of vigilance to alert the population, based on uncertain clues. Our hypothesis is that this change of perspective can improve the player's awareness and response to future flood vigilance announcements. We evaluated this game through an online survey where people were asked to answer a questionnaire about flood risk awareness and behavioural intentions before and after playing the game, in order to assess its impact.