As pandemic-driven social distancing and self-isolation measures permeate society, safeguarding vulnerable people's mental and physical well-being is more important than ever. This trend had already led to a surge in technologies aimed at enabling loved ones and caregivers to monitor seniors and engage with them remotely, but the COVID-19 crisis has lent an air of urgency to the endeavor. A quick glance across this landscape shows fall-detection contraptions, targeted social networks, and more. Artificial intelligence (AI) in particular is gaining a firmer foothold, with AI-powered social companions and fancy wearables designed to track all manner of activity or changes in behavior. Fledgling Israeli startup MyndYou is using AI to help care providers assess and monitor elderly patients from afar, with a platform centered on passive data collection, automated engagement, and remote intervention.

In the fast-changing digital milieu, people like brands to treat them like humans and not merely as transactions.By Ajit Kumar and Vidhya Visweswarababu Imagine walking into a room of strangers, friends and family, expressing your intent to start an exciting new initiative and asking them for an investment. The strangers will likely ask you questions and make an investment if they see a benefit. Friends on the other hand feel happy for you knowing how hard you worked for it and may proceed to make an investment if there is mutual benefit or because you're a loyal friend. Family on the hand, knowing your personality, capabilities, dreams, desires and aspirations may choose to inquire, advice and collaborate to drive you to the right outcome. As a brand, your engagement with your customer might feel like a stranger, friend or family.

The young brothers were thrilled to find a 3D printer under their Christmas tree. Joseph, 13, planned to make Minecraft figures; Isaac, 11, Pokémon characters. But the Sparey-Taylor family was about to move house, so the printer stayed in its box for a few weeks. The move was off, the boys' school closed, and the 3D printer seemed a good way of filling long days at home. Instead of Pokémon and Minecraft figures, the boys – with help from their parents – embarked on a very different project: printing PPE visors for people working in local care homes in Wrexham, north Wales.

A new method to accurately record brain activity at scale has been developed by researchers at the Crick, Stanford University and UCL. The technique could lead to new medical devices to help amputees, people with paralysis or people with neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease. The research in mice, published in Science Advances, developed an accurate and scalable method to record brain activity across large areas, including on the surface and in deeper regions simultaneously. Using the latest in electronics and engineering techniques, the new device combines silicon chip technology with super-slim microwires, up to 15-times thinner than a human hair. The wires are so thin they can be placed deep in the brain without causing significant damage.

In early 2009, the Google Self-Driving Car Project was born, evolving over the years into what we now know as Waymo. Not long after the project started, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page challenged engineers to drive autonomously without human intervention or disengagements along ten challenging 100-mile routes in Google's home state of California. Yes, that was long before state governments started granting licenses for driverless car testing on public roads. The first state to issue such a license was Nevada in May 2012, with California doing the same only in September 2014. So how did Google get away with testing fully-autonomous cars on public roads in California in 2009?

We are at a crossroads. A crossroads that will in large part determine the future of journalism. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented crisis that could decimate certain media organizations. One possible solution has been proposed: artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers "to intelligent machines that learn from experience and perform tasks like humans," according to Francesco Marconi, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York who has just published a book on the subject: Newsmakers, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism.

The COVID Tracking Project collects and publishes the most complete testing data available for US states and territories.

So says the famed quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest, alleging that we can look to what has already happened as an indication of what will happen next. This idea could be interpreted as being rather bleak; are we doomed to repeat the errors of the past until we correct them? We certainly do need to learn and re-learn life lessons--whether in our work, relationships, finances, health, or other areas--in order to grow as people. Zooming out, the same phenomenon exists on a much bigger scale--that of our collective human history. We like to think we're improving as a species, but haven't yet come close to doing away with the conflicts and injustices that plagued our ancestors. What might happen over the course of this year, and what information would we use to make educated guesses about it?

Esteban Granero has some good news, a little light at the end of a long, dark tunnel in Spain, where the coronavirus crisis has left more than 21,000 people dead. "The situation is terrible," says the midfielder, a league title winner with Real Madrid, "but the curve is clearly downward now; we reached the peak on the fourth [of April] and now we're on the way down. Things shift daily but we think at the end of the month, early May, the number of cases will be very low and there will be room for optimism." Granero does not speak lightly. He has been watching the trends carefully.

A major computing breakthrough has allowed researchers to develop ultra-low power devices capable of operating at the same voltage level as a brain. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst figured out a way to use biological, electricity conducting filaments to make an electronic memory device known as a memristor. Using protein nanowires developed from the bacterium Geobacter, the scientists realised they could create a device as power-efficient as a human brain synapse. Details of the new technology were published in the journal Nature Communications. "People probably didn't even dare to hope that we could create a device that is as power-efficient as the biological counterparts in a brain, but now we have realistic evidence of ultra-low power computing capabilities," said computer engineering researcher and co-author Jun Yao.