IDTechEx, the leading provider of independent market research, business intelligence and events on emerging technology announces the availability of a new research report, Microcontrollers and Single-board Computers 2016-2026 [http://www.idtechex.com/mc The report focuses on applications, technologies, players, and markets for microcontrollers (MCU) and single-board computers (SBC). This report goes into detail with definitions, anatomy and key components as well as an explanation how MCUs and SBCs are made, what they can do, their limitations and what comes next. The report includes ten year forecasts and discusses applications for both, including cars, home and office, automotive, DC-DC converters for battery monitoring, energy harvesting and microgrids, education, wearable technology, touch screen controllers, motor control, including quadcopters, control of stepper and traction motors. It also takes a look at artificial intelligence and deep learning, control of 3D printers, microwave ovens and washing machines.

For the second time in months, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said "we will fight on to liberate every inch of our land". The last time Assad made a similar statement, he was scolded by the Russian ambassador to the UN who said this was not in line with the Kremlin's policies. At the time, it wasn't - Russia was pushing for a political settlement and was involved in efforts with the United States to bring about a cessation of hostilities to create a conducive atmosphere for peace talks. This time around, however, Assad has so far not been told off. Instead, Russia sent its defence minister to Iran's capital Tehran to take part in talks with his Syrian and Iranian counterparts.

Since there have been teen drivers, there have been bad teen drivers. I counted myself among them, once "running over" a boulder while on a driving lesson with my mother at age 16. If only Ellen Bogage had a car with a "nanny mode," controls that allow parents to limit a vehicle's velocity when their teen is driving, alert them to their car's whereabouts and even provide seat belt warnings and radio volume controls. Now, a go-kart, designed for 5 to 9 year-olds, has some of the same rudimentary "nanny" features that my dear mother would have clamored for when I seized freedom and jumped behind the wheel on my own. The "Arrow Smart-Kart" from California-based Actev Motors is WiFi enabled and, via an app, allows parents to set maximum speeds (though the go-kart only tops out 12 miles an hour), geographic boundaries and to remotely stop the vehicle in its tracks. The kart also has front-end collision avoidance technology, so children who don't use the breaks won't ram themselves into the garage door.

"I'm a weird person," he says, "who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building." In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes? They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game.1 Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness. The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test.

Artificial intelligence, wearable sensors, virtual reality, medical robots – these disruptive technologies are completely changing the way patients and doctors think and act about healthcare. It also seems inevitable that medical robots, automation and artificial intelligence will replace many jobs in healthcare. But as with other fields of innovation, there will be areas which will thrive with the help of new technologies. Surgical robots become increasingly precise every day, man-sized machines can lift and transport patients throughout the hospital, while it only takes the Xenex robot 10 minutes to disinfect a patient room with UV light. Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla once said technology would replace 80% of doctors in the future, because machines will be more accurate, objective and cheaper than the average doctor.

Public and private sector cybersecurity leaders are rapidly shifting their attention to technologies like analytics and artificial intelligence which increase their ability to predict, and ultimately prevent, cyber incidents. During this panel, Donna Dodson ( Associate Director, Chief Cybersecurity Advisor and Director, NIST), Mark Kneidinger (Director, Federal Network Resiliency, DHS), Malcolm Harkins (ICIT Fellow - Cylance) and Stan Wisseman (ICIT Fellow - HPE) discuss this trend and share real world examples of how these technologies are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape.

We look at the latest developments in robotics, including'cobots': intelligent devices that may soon be appearing at a care home near you. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones has been meeting some of them at Europe's leading annual robotics exhibition. Also, we talk to Hillary Clinton's former senior advisor for innovation, Alec Ross, who's written a book called The Industries of the Future about evolutions in the workplace. And we talk to Chetan Dube, president and CEO of the company Ipsoft, who's just announced that his company is building an entire business practice around a virtual agent called Amelia. Is all of this innovation a burden off our backs?

Google earlier this month released to the public the first piece of original music created by Magenta, a project that utilizes the artificial intelligence engine TensorFlow to determine if an AI system can create compelling pieces of art and music. It's only fitting, then, that the composition be followed by a short film. Sunspring, starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, was written by an LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) recurrent neural network. As Gizmodo recounts, Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed the neural network a smattering of sci-fi scripts and a series of prompts for which to base its film on. Found is a TechSpot feature where we share clever, funny or otherwise interesting stuff from around the web.

NOVI, MI – Machine learning might sound like the backdrop to a dark science-fiction movie, but Mercedes-Benz believes putting the technology into to its cars and trucks will make the everyday grind go more smoothly. "Machine learning can simplify and personalize the driver experience," says Kal Mos, vice president-North America R&D at Mercedes-Benz. Machine learning inside Mercedes-Benz vehicles, beginning with the C-Class and S-Class cars before rolling out through the brand's portfolio, observes owner habits, trains itself to recognize those patterns, preferences and tendencies and eventually predicts what the driver may want next. Mos, speaking at TU Automotive Detroit 2016, a connected-vehicle conference here, admits the learning does not occur overnight. Nor should it, he says.

Consider: Facebook snapped up shopping search engine TheFind this spring and virtual reality startups Pebbles Interfaces and Surreal Vision last year, building on the social networking leader's 2014 purchase of Oculus VR. E-commerce giant Amazon nabbed cloud computing startups Amiato, 2lemetry, Elemental Technologies and Italy's Nice, as well as chipmaker Annapurna Labs, which brought it new data center technology. Google and its parent Alphabet acquired at least 15 small companies last year, many with mobile technologies. By the 1980s, many were dismantled. Some tech pundits fret that Google, Amazon and Facebook could stray too far from their core businesses as well.