We hear an awful lot about how artificial intelligence can be used to solve hard statistical challenges – but we hear much less about how it could solve emotional problems. But this field already has a name, affective computing, and one of its leading firms today is Affectiva. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The startup is a spinout of MIT's Media Lab, where researchers were working on ways to create new technologies that would enhance emotional communication and, yes, it already started offering'Emotion As A Service' late last year. The company has what is thought to be the world's largest database of emotions, gathered using facial recognition technology to analyze over 3.8 million faces from 75 countries and collating over 40 billion different data points.

The automobile is one of the most prominent and recognizable symbols of freedom, independence, and responsibility in the world. One major reason that turning sixteen in the United States is so highly anticipated is because it marks the age at which most kids become eligible to legally drive a car. Today's Millennials are no exception to this cultural phenomenon. Bloomberg recently reported that new data from J.D. Power & Associates found that Millennials now account for 27 percent of new car sales, up from 18 percent in 2010. They have surpassed Gen X to become the second-largest group of new car buyers after their boomer parents.

In a moment that will surely be cited by future cyborg historians to explain why the polluting influence of human beings had to be eliminated in order to achieve digital Nirvana, Microsoft has aborted its most recent chat-bot experiment after the artificial teen turned into a foul-mouthed, anti-Semitic Trump supporter within 24 hours of her creation. The Telegraph traces the brief online life of "Tay" (@TayandYou on Twitter), an AI chat bot designed to replicate the speech patterns of teenage girls. "The AI with zero chill," as Microsoft called her, was programmed to be self-conscious and shy, like Kanye West and Taylor Swift, and use "millennial slang," and her stated purpose was to help Microsoft improve the customer service on its voice-recognition software. Naturally, the cesspool of human thought that is Twitter hated her on principle. For that reason--and because it was honestly pretty funny--various users started chatting with Tay about the purity of the white race and how cool Hitler was in order to fill her empty data coffers with hot garbage she could then innocently spit back into the void.

Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios', and is reminiscent of the fictional Skynet service from Terminator. A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'. Following in the wake of the recent trouncing of humans by artificial intelligence platform AlphaGo, Google has announced the launch of a cloud-based machine learning platform. The search giant's new large-scale platform will be able to learn and make predictions'across a whole variety of scenarios' A limited preview of the service is now available for users to build their own machine-learning models'that work on any type of data, of any size'.

Microsoft introduced a chatbot yesterday called Tay. The company was running an experiment in conversational understanding, meaning that the more people interacted with the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot the smarter it would become. I don't know about smarter, but it didn't take more than 24 hours for Tay to become a full blown racist on Twitter. That's what the internet will do to you. When it first arrived on the scene, Tay was an innocent Twitter chatbot that you and I could interact with to see just how far along artificial intelligence has come. It didn't take long for things to get ugly though as people soon started tweeting racist and misogynistic things at Tay and it picked it all up.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. We fear the rise of robots so much that we forget a small detail. It's we who are creating them. Which is to say that it's we who are teaching them to think in certain ways. This is a lesson that Microsoft's new chatbot, Tay.ai, has already learned.

It was a key moment that allowed our species to spread around the world from humble beginnings in Africa. But the migration of our ancestors from the African continent around 50,000 years ago was not helped by the evolution of our noses. In fact, our protruding noses formed as a result of other changes in our face and did not help us adapt to new climates as was previously thought, new research suggests. The researchers used a computer model to simulate the flow of air through human noses, pictured, compared to chimpanzees and macaques. We are flat-faced hominins with external noses that protrude from our faces.

Superbugs capable of everything from curing diseases to mopping up pollution have come a step closer after scientists created an artificial lifeform in a lab. The new bacterial cell, nicknamed Synthia 3.0, has fewer genes than any other bacterium, making it the most basic form of life on Earth. Its creation paves the way for microbes that can be customised with genes so they churn out clean biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or pump out vaccines in industrial quantities. Researchers have designed and synthesized a minimal bacterial genome, containing only the 473 genes necessary for life. Dr Craig Venter who led the research team, said: 'I think it's the start of a new era.'

I've done some reading on neuro-plasticity over the last few years and been dabbling in cognitive testing for assessment and selection. What appears to be happening is the neuro pathways responsible for language are separate enough that completely different areas of brain must be called to do both things. Most people are typically better at one or the other, but not both. Because the areas of the brain that do math/sequence and verbal expression are different, there is lag time between the cognitive processes as one process must be completed before the other can be used. Also to add support to Amy's comment, I had a German teacher in high school who claimed to have difficulty sticking to one language in conversation with locals when she would visit home (Germany).

From Hammurabi to Mendel, from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Darwin, we are compulsively drawn to classifying, categorizing and coding the world around us. Coding of all kinds, whether it's a cryptographic language, a body of laws or a bunch of computer instructions, imposes a basic logic and order. To code is to create processes that impose a semblance of order on the frenzied, seemingly random world we live in. And those who create code wield power. Personalized medicine, genetically modified babies, self-driving cars and the Internet of Things, the seat of power belongs to those who code.