More than 15,000 Twitter bots used the I Voted hashtag on midterm Election Day in 2018. If you want to make more money, maybe you should become an active Twitter user. It's a hub of highly educated adults who earn higher salaries than the U.S. public overall. Tweeters also tend to have some distinct political views. Pew Research recently set out to find out which voices are loudest on the social media site by sampling accounts held by about 2,700 random U.S. adults.

Facial recognition technology at airports is being called into question after a viral Twitter exchange highlighted the privacy concerns associated with the systems, which are rapidly being deployed by airlines across the U.S. Writer MacKenzie Fegan was startled when her photo was taken by facial recognition cameras as she boarded her international JetBlue flight. Fegan confronted JetBlue about the experience in a lengthy Twitter thread, asking questions about how the system operated, but the airline didn't provide many answers. It comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently said it hopes to expand use of facial recognition at airports to scan 97 percent of all passengers departing the country by 2023. 'I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight,' Fegan wrote on Twitter. 'Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge.

A new surgical robot can guide surgeons' tools straight to the heart by itself - like a self-driving car inside the body. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have developed an autonomous catheter that steers itself through the body to sidestep potential navigation errors by surgeons. The first-of-its kind invention successfully reached its targets in a series of tests on pigs. For now, scientists are only looking at the autonomous tech for navigation, but some hope surgeries themselves could be done entirely by robots. But the Food and Drug Administration has warned that some robotic surgeries may be less effective than manual ones - and the public is not yet ready to trust an autonomous machine on the road, so letting one in the body might scare some.

Artificial intelligence has been used to generate an endless stream of death metal music which will play on YouTube for 24 hours a day. The creation comes from two US programmers who built a virtual band known as'Dadabot'. It creators are now letting the technology play forever via a live stream called'Relentless Doppelganger' on the video-sharing platform. An AI system has been programmed to generate heavy metal music on YouTube 24 hours a day, with the aim to do so until'infinity'. Dadabot, and its continual supply of music, was trained using a large amount of music from Canadian death metal band Archspire.

Researchers say powerful, artificially-intelligent surveillance systems capable of tracking your every move may have an unlikely kryptonite: a simple printable patch. In a demonstration, engineers from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, showed how subjects wearing specially designed patches -- about the size of a vinyl record -- were able to elude an algorithm designed to identify humans. In a YouTube video two researchers, one without the patch and another with the colorful card hung around his neck, are shown standing in front of a camera working in tandem with an algorithm to identify both objects and humans in the room. In a demonstration, engineers from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, showed how subjects wearing specially designed patches -- about the size of a vinyl record -- were able to allude an algorithm designed to identify humans. While the demonstrator without the patch is clearly marked by the algorithm, his counterpart seems to be completely invisible.

The photonic switch is built with more than 50,000 microscopic "light switches" etched into a silicon wafer. Each light switch (small raised squares) directs one of 240 tiny beams of light to either make a right turn when the switch is on, or to pass straight through when the switch is off. Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have built a new photonic switch that can control the direction of light passing through optical fibers faster and more efficiently than ever. This optical "traffic cop" could one day revolutionize how information travels through data centers and high-performance supercomputers that are used for artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications. The photonic switch is built with more than 50,000 microscopic "light switches," each of which directs one of 240 tiny beams of light to either make a right turn when the switch is on, or to pass straight through when the switch is off.

In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that "time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is." In this month's issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various portals in science, we revisited our 2014 video interview with Tegmark (transcribed below for the first time), in which the professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains why the feeling of time is one thing and the math quite another. That Tegmark, also the author of 2017's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, takes the keenest pleasure from peering into the world through the kaleidoscope of his physics toolbox is amply clear. During our interview, leaning out of his chair, waving his arms, pouring his water bottle onto the carpeted hotel floor to drive home a point, he was in a constant state of animation, much like the objects (both microscopic and gargantuan) that he studies. You say time doesn't flow, but our subjective perception is that it does. Where do we go wrong?

Electrodes on the brain have been used to translate brainwaves into words spoken by a computer – which could be useful in the future to help people who have lost the ability to speak. When you speak, your brain sends signals from the motor cortex to the muscles in your jaw, lips and larynx to coordinate their movement and produce a sound. "The brain translates the thoughts of what you want to say into movements of the vocal tract, and that's what we're trying to decode," says Edward Chang at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He and his colleagues created a two-step process to decode those thoughts using an array of electrodes surgically placed onto the part of the brain that controls movement, and a computer simulation of a vocal tract to reproduce the sounds of speech. In their study, they worked with five participants who had electrodes on the surface of their motor cortex as a part of their treatment for epilepsy.

The UK government is happy to allow Huawei equipment to form part of the UK's 5G network – just not any of the crucial parts, according to leaked discussions from the National Security Council. The United States and Australia have taken much more hardline approach, with complete bans on using Huawei equipment to form any part of their 5G network. What is all the worry about? According to telecoms firm Qualcomm, 5G mobile internet gives a massive speed boost – at least 10 or 20 times greater – over our current 4G networks. As devices start sharing more and more data, from phones streaming data-rich video to self-driving cars, it's vital to have a speedy connection.

Facebook has said that it expects to be fined up to $5bn by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. The penalty would be a record by the agency against a technology company and a sign that the United States was willing to punish big tech companies. The social network disclosed the amount in its quarterly financial results on Wednesday, saying it estimated a one-time charge of $3bn to $5bn in connection with an "ongoing inquiry" by the commission. Facebook added that "the matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or the terms of any final outcome". We'll tell you what's true.