An octopus likes to be wined and dined during sex. A study looking at the larger Pacific striped octopus shows that, unlike most octopuses, the male and female face each other when mating – a pose that may allow them to feed together at the same time (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134152). Now glasses can hide you from prying eyes. A team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics has developed a pair of glasses whose patterning foils face recognition software. The Privacy Visor is expected to go on sale in June 2016 for about $240.

It is vital to the economy that Australia embraces innovation, according to Andrew Penn, with the Telstra CEO saying Australia should mimic the telecommunications company's strategy of combining incubation and collaboration with building human skills and developing new technologies. Speaking at the Charles Todd Oration 2015 in Sydney on Thursday, Penn outlined the three drivers of innovation as being a combination of the move to mobile and consequently the Internet of Things (IoT); the widespread usage of cloud computing; and the rise of machine-to-machine (M2M) learning and artificial intelligence. "The exponential growth in data, driven by a massive shift to mobile and the Internet of Things with the ability to store and access that data in the cloud in real-time and the computing power with advanced algorithms and machine learning -- these factors together are providing the capacity to solve almost limitless problems," the CEO said. Citing a recent Deloitte report, Penn claimed that the digital sector contributed AU$79 billion in 2014 -- or 5.1 percent of the GDP -- making it the largest segment of the Australian economy. He said that the rapidity of technological innovation has had far-reaching implications for traditional business, however.

Suppose you could discern market trends, speed up time to see where those trends were going, then bet on what you discovered. Geeks in suits are doing that today. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. I was sitting on a sofa in the guru's office. I trekked to this high mountain outpost a couple of years ago to arrive at one of the planet's power points, the national research labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The guru's office was decorated with colorful posters of past conferences that traced the almost mythical career of this high-tech legend: from a maverick physics student who formed an underground band of hippie hackers to break the bank at Las Vegas with a wearable computer, to a principal character in a renegade band of scientists who invented the accelerating science of chaos by studying a dripping faucet, to a founding father of the artificial life movement, to the head of a small lab investigating the new science of complexity in an office kitty-corner to the museum of atomic weapons at Los Alamos -- the office I had trekked to. The guru, Doyne Farmer, looked like Ichabod Crane in a bolo tie. Tall, bony, probably thirty-something, Doyne (pronounced Doan) was about to embark on his next remarkable adventure. He was starting a company to beat the odds on Wall Street by predicting stock prices with computer simu-lations. He was going to hack the global economy. Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled. As the information of money swishes around the planet, it leaves in its wake a history of its flow, and if any of that complex flow can be anticipated, then the hacker who cracks the pattern will become a rich hacker. Some sort of financial hacking has been around as long as computers.

Every few decades, a pandemic flu variant emerges that not only infects humans but also passes rapidly from person to person. The H7N9 avian flu virus that infected more than 130 people in China this spring, primarily from close contact with poultry, hasn't yet become highly contagious among people. But given that humans lack the antibodies to combat the virus, its high lethality rate (44 of the infected died), and the possibility that it could resurface this fall or winter, scientists and public health officials are racing to unravel its mysteries. Recent studies of H7N9 show that it can pass among ferrets, which are often used to model human flu transmission. If the virus gains the ability to spread easily among people, it has the potential to be deadlier than the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which may have been responsible for more than 200,000 deaths worldwide. Researchers like Raul Rabadan, a theoretical physicist working in biology at Columbia University, want to understand how viruses that ordinarily infect birds or pigs suddenly jump to humans and then become easily transmissible: "What are the specific mutations that contribute to a virus becoming a human pathogen?" he explained.

Three college kids in Australia have built an autonomous vehicle controlled by a smartphone. To be fair, calling it a "vehicle" is a bit of a stretch. What Tommi Sullivan, Michael Lennon, and Yukito Tsunoda have made at Griffith University in Queensland is the coolest freaking Power Wheels you've ever seen. They used the same four-wheeled plastic toy we drove as toddlers and an Android smartphone to create a fully-functional autonomous "car" that took home the 2013 Queensland iAwards in Brisbane. "A normal unmanned vehicle would usually use a camera or a different sensor or a Ladar [sic] on the top," said Sullivan, who's working on his bachelor's degree in information technology.

Today's computer processors and displays will also support tele-immersive environments. Handling and transporting all that time-sensitive data, however, is still a stretch for ordinary desktop operating systems and the Internet. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley have developed software, dubbed Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody (TEEVE), that aims to bridge this gap. The system captures and coordinates video streams from three or more sets of four cameras, each of which generates a stream of three-dimensional video data. The system generates macro video frames made up of the frames from all of the cameras at one time interval, and sends them over a network in a way that evenly distributes the data so that it does not overload the network.

Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone. "I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand. The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

As museums worldwide strive to draw in young people, Tate Britain could place itself at the cutting edge with a project for Internet viewers to drive robots around its galleries at weekends, shining lights and cameras on artworks that loom out of the dark. The robot idea is one of four finalists for the new Tate IK Prize. The winning project will become a reality by the summer. "We wanted ways to use technology to increase our audience reach and new ways to connect people with art," said Jane Burton, the Tate's head of creative content. Another finalist proposes reproducing the gallery as a version of the popular Minecraft videogame.

Helen Greiner, of US company iRobot Corp, is here promoting a carpet cleaning robot. They're small, unobstrusive, and seem happy to do a job few if any of us enjoy. Such is the appeal of iRobot Corporation's vacuum cleaner known as Roomba that the Massachusetts-based company has already sold more than a million of them in the US. Some, says iRobot chairwoman Helen Greiner, have been named. "Rosie is a highly popular (name) and so is Abby or Agnes," Ms Greiner says.