It may sound like the premise of a science fiction film. But, believe it or not, scientists at Boston University claim to have discovered a game-changing blood test that could help predict lifespans. The study, published in the journal Aging Cell on Friday, used biomarker data collected from 5,000 blood samples and analysed it against the donors' health developments over the subsequent eight years. Together, they identified patterns which indicated both good and bad futures. In all, the researchers generated 26 different predictive biomarker signatures.

Most of our editors eschewed the typical New Year's Eve celebrations and arrived in Las Vegas on New Year's Day. One of us even arrived on December 31st and spent the last few hours of 2016 in bed. All of that just to give our all to the annual tradition that is CES. We spent the past few days walking the show floor, attending evening events and covering press conferences just to bring you the very best from CES 2017. And now, we're ready to unveil the finalists for our annual Best of CES awards. Below you'll find our selections for 15 categories, which range from accessibility tech to wearables. We'll announce our category winners tomorrow, which is also when we'll reveal the recipient of our Best of the Best award, the most coveted prize of them all. That special award is selected from our pool of category winners. If you want your voice heard too -- and who doesn't? -- there's an additional category for People's Choice, where you can vote for your favorite entry in our compilation of finalists. Just head on over to our poll right here to cast your ballot. All award winners will be announced at a special ceremony tomorrow at our CES stage, so be sure to come back right here on Engadget around 5PM PT / 8PM ET Saturday to watch it all unfold.

Imagine a world where talent acquisition professionals don't have to spend hours sifting through resumes or LinkedIn profiles. A world where they can instead focus on marketing the position to a smaller pool of qualified candidates, properly assessing their fit during the interview process and ultimately cutting the time to hire by a significant amount. This is the world of artificial intelligence. As a recent Wired article points out, "the world's biggest tech companies are aggressively remaking themselves around artificial intelligence," which is why companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook are investing heavily in it. But before we dive in too deep, let's outline the basics of this digital phenomenon.

Networked Insights, a Chicago-based company whose tools crawl the social web and analyze data for marketers, has raised $30 million in Series E funding, the company announced Friday. The company sifts through 560 million social media posts from 30 million sources daily, it said on its website. It sorts and analyzes that information for marketers and agencies, and pitches itself as a way for them to create better-targeted and more effective campaigns. Its clients include NBC Universal, media-buying agency GroupM, and American Family Insurance, whose venture arm is an investor. The funding will help Networked Insights invest in deep learning and artificial intelligence capabilities on its platform, Kairos, the company said. It said it would also use the infusion to enter partnerships and pursue acquisitions.

For cord cutters who want nothing but the best, Nvidia's $200 Shield TV console has always been the box of choice for streaming videos and even games. At CES 2017, the company announced a new-and-improved version that adds in HDR support, refines gaming and entertainment options, and even transforms the Android TV device into a voice-controlled rival of the Amazon Echo. We've already covered all the details revealed during Nvidia's CES 2017 press conference, but I just spent over an hour at Nvidia's suite to learn more about the new Shield TV's every nook and cranny. Here are some initial impressions, and a look at some of the more nitty-gritty improvements that weren't mentioned during the keynote. Before we even get into flashy features like smart-home controls and Google Assistant, the second-gen Shield TV packs worthwhile quality-of-life improvements over its predecessor.

Contrary to popular belief, video games might actually be beneficial for mental health. A joint study by the University of Washington and the University of California San Francisco found that people responded better to treatment through a mobile game than to traditional in-person therapy. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Depression and Anxiety, focused on adults over 60 who had been diagnosed with late onset depression, a specific form categorized by an inability to focus due to overwhelming worry. Half the group received the mobile technology treatment, called Project: EVO, while the other half received an in-person treatment known as problem-solving therapy. The participants who used Project: EVO reported improved moods and increased attention span and ability to function.

A computer vision system has been developed that detects suspicious behaviour in CCTV footage as it happens. Researchers involved in the P-REACT project, which is the work of a consortium of European companies and organisations and is partly funded by a grant from the European Commission, say the surveillance technology could help catch criminals in the act and relieve police of "digital evidence overload" by highlighting video clips most likely to be relevant to investigations. "If a camera at a gas station picks up suspicious activity, the video footage will be sent to the cloud, people at the gas station will be alerted, and nearby cameras will be told to look out for the criminals too," says project coordinator Juan Arraiza at Vicomtech, a research foundation in San Sebastian, Spain. Its algorithms have been trained on sample scenes of people fighting, chasing someone or snatching a bag.

In the early nineteen-nineties, a few occurrences sparked something in Ted Chiang's mind. He attended a one-man show in Seattle, where he lives, about a woman's death from cancer. A little later, a friend had a baby and told Chiang about recognizing her son from his movements in the womb. Chiang thought back to certain physical principles he had learned about in high school, in Port Jefferson, New York, having to do with the nature of time. The idea for a story emerged, about accepting the arrival of the inevitable.

Traditional automakers, many of whom ushered in an era of incredible disruption nearly a century ago, now face disruption themselves from four modern forces -- connected, autonomous, shared and electric cars. The infrastructure and scale required to build a connected car is incredibly complicated, expensive and resource intensive. At its core, it's a software challenge, and a chief obstacle for these brands is integrating the complex cloud technology required to deliver next-generation driving experiences. Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we announced the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, a set of services built on the Microsoft Azure cloud and designed to empower auto manufacturers to create custom connected driving experiences. This is not an in-car operating system or a "finished product;" it's a living, agile platform that starts with the cloud as the foundation and aims to address five core scenarios that our partners have told us are key priorities: predictive maintenance, improved in-car productivity, advanced navigation, customer insights and help building autonomous driving capabilities.

The robot can gather a piece of fruit and sort by size automatically. Last month as our Mixing Bowl colleagues Michael Rose and An Wang were interviewing Sonny Ranaswamy of the USDA's NIFA to better understand current US food and agriculture labor issues, we were representing The Mixing Bowl in discussions on potential solutions to food production labor issues through automation and robotics. At this year's RoboUniverse event in San Diego there was a full-day track on December 14th dedicated to the application of robotics to agriculture. The industry track, pulled together in great part by Nathan Dorn, CEO of Food Origins and an Advisor to The Mixing Bowl, featured a knowledgeable group of automation/robotics experts and food producers who drew on their experience to define the opportunities and sharpen focus on the challenges. Nathan authored a detailed summary of the day in a post on Agfunder.