Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew playing an April Fool's Day prank on Kochie. IT'S April Fool's Day today, and Australian companies have gotten into the spirit by having a lend of their customers in some very creative ways. Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew had Kochie fooled when she announced she was engaged to her long time partner Neil Varcoe today. To carry out the joke she used Natalie Barr's ring and put it on her hand. Australia's online dating site eHarmony, in partnership with WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo in Darling Harbour, announced the launch of aHarmony, a revolutionary new dating platform specifically designed for animals, where pet owners can find fluffy, scaly or even prickly partners using eHarmony's famous Compatibility Matching System.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams' comedic sci-fi series from the 1970s, the Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three are one of the most insecure and angry life forms in the galaxy. They have "impatient chromosomes" that instantly adapt to their surroundings. If they are sitting at a table, for instance, and are unable to reach a coffee spoon, "they are liable without a moment's consideration to mutate into something with far longer arms … but which is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee." Susan M. Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine, quotes Adams' "(deliciously) askew" story in a research paper on mutations in evolution as an example of how, according to standard neo-Darwinian theory, evolution does not work. Organisms, all good students know, do not generate rapid genetic mutations in response to their environment. There are exceptions, such as mutations spurred by certain chemicals or radiation.

Young scientists should be valued by their commitment to education, their dedication to fighting inequality in science, and their efforts to democratize science.

Technology has been shaping and driving human behaviour since the advent of flint axes. But we are on the cusp of technological changes that undermine central assumptions of doing business. Revolutions in mobile, cloud, data, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are coming to bear on many of several inter-related costs that inform business decisions – marginal, transaction, distribution and opportunity costs. Without these costs as a guide for efficiency, or acting as barriers for new ventures, a lot of strategic thinking will need to change. Basic economic theory states that businesses should set their prices at their marginal cost – the cost of servicing each incremental customer.

Most babies' first words are "mama" and "dada," but for an artificially intelligent being called "BABY X," her first words were "puppy," "apple," and "sheep." Aww! How adorable for technology that so many believe will power our future mechanical overlords. And at least it's better than Tay.ai, Microsoft's teenaged AI Twitter robot that recently got sent to her room for spewing hate all over the Internet. BABY X was created by Dr. Mark Sagar, a motion graphics specialist who won Oscars for his work on movies like King Kong and Avatar.

In what is being called the start of the cognitive era for computing, IBM's new Watson computer program is able to mine data to think and solve problems. Significantly, it learns from its mistakes. Watson is already being used by businesses to deliver a competitive advantage. Examples include ANZ, one of Australia's largest banks, the energy company Woodside, and Melbourne's Deakin University. While artificial intelligence (AI) has benefits, there are also concerns.

Previous articles have detailed the ways in which they represent the next great leap in computer technology, allowing the possibility of things like vastly improved machine learning, artificial intelligence, and a number of other things straight out of science fiction. The problem has always been building them, but one major breakthrough just made getting there much easier. But to begin, you need to understand a bit about how quantum computers work. Now, research published in Science Advances details the creation of the first quantum Fredkin gate, a key component in making the quantum circuits that are required for quantum computers. Researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland used linear optics to perform the first demonstration of the quantum Fredkin gate. The Fredkin gate, or the controlled swap gate, is a three-qubit gate where, depending on the state of the control qubit, the quantum states of the two target qubits are swapped.The Fredkin gate typically requires a circuit of five logic operations to be implemented.

This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online The future of artificial intelligence begins with a game of Space Invaders. From the start, the enemy aliens are making kills -- three times they destroy the defending laser cannon within seconds. Half an hour in, and the hesitant player starts to feel the game's rhythm, learning when to fire back or hide. Finally, after playing ceaselessly for an entire night, the player is not wasting a single bullet, casually shooting the high-score floating mothership in between demolishing each alien. No one in the world can play a better game at this moment. This player, it should be mentioned, is not human, but an algorithm on a graphics processing unit programmed by a company called DeepMind. Instructed simply to maximise the score and fed only the data stream of 30,000 pixels per frame, the algorithm -- known as a deep Q-network – is then given a new challenge: an unfamiliar Pong-like game called Breakout, in which it needs to hit a ball through a rainbow-coloured brick wall. "After 30 minutes and 100 games, it's pretty terrible, but it's learning that it should move the bat towards the ball," explains DeepMind's cofounder and chief executive, a 38-year-old artificial-intelligence researcher named Demis Hassabis. "Here it is after an hour, quantitatively better but still not brilliant. But two hours in, it's more or less mastered the game, even when the ball's very fast. After four hours, it came up with an optimal strategy -- to dig a tunnel round the side of the wall, and send the ball round the back in a superhuman accurate way. The designers of the system didn't know that strategy."

It has been a nightmare of a PR week for Microsoft. It started with the head of Microsoft's Xbox division, Phil Spencer, having to apologise for having scantily clad female dancers dressed as school girls at a party thrown by Microsoft at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). He said that having the dancers at this event "was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values. That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated". The matter was being dealt with internally and so we don't know who would have been responsible and why they might have thought this was going to be a good idea.

Recently there's been quite a lot of talk about artificial intelligence. More specifically, the news has been covered with self learning and life like A.I./robots. From Microsofts @TayAndYou and Hanson Robotics's Sophia to Cornell's Self Walking Robot and ICTA, Australia's Self Cooking Robot…it has become mainstream. There's no stopping the coming of self learning/intelligent robots so I think it's best we discuss their potentially incredible uses, as well as their potentially devastating flaws. It's really important that we take AI seriously.