People who speak more than one language may have a'bilingual advantage' in their ability to stay focused. According to a new study, bilingual individuals are equipped with enhanced attentional control abilities, allowing them to concentrate better on specific tasks than their monolingual counterparts. Researchers suggest this may be the result of a lifetime of switching between different languages. The researchers recruited 99 participants to partake in three psychological tests. In one, known as the Flanker task, the subjects were asked to indicate the direction of a central arrow among rows of others, by pressing a left or right button.

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. One in 14 working-age Americans suffer from voice disorders that are often associated with abnormal vocal behaviors -- some of which can cause damage to vocal cord tissue and lead to the formation of nodules or polyps that interfere with normal speech production. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning.

Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names. Innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all contributed mightily to the technologies that have transformed our daily lives and society. If you're not an engineer, however, you have probably never heard of the brilliant inventor Rudolf Kálmán, a Budapest-born engineer and mathematician who died on July 2 in Gainesville, Florida, at age 86. His fundamental contribution, an algorithm called the Kalman filter, made possible many essential technological achievements of the last 50 years. These include aerospace systems such as the computers that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon, robotic vehicles that explore our world from the deep sea to the outer planets, and nearly any endeavor that needs to estimate the state of the world from noisy data. Someone once described the entire GPS system--an Earth-girdling constellation of satellites, ground stations, and computers as "one enormous Kalman filter."

Playing video games is good for children's brains – but only if they play no more than two hours a week. More than this increases the likelihood the child will get into trouble at school with their teachers, fight with their friends and have reduced social abilities. But rationing gaming to just two hours found that for children aged 7-11 playing games for one hour a week led to better motor skills and higher achievement scores in school. Playing video games is good for children's brains – but only if they play no more than two hours a week (stock image) To study the effect of video game playing, Dr Jesus Pujol and colleagues studied 2,442 children aged between 7 and 11 years. Children suffering from'probably gaming addiction' were excluded from the study.

Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has had a career as varied as it has been successful. A former professor of physics at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, he has worked on the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Richard Feynman, nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, biology, and the application of useful and elegant math problems. One of his ideas, the Dyson Sphere, was featured in a "Star Trek" episode. Today, Dyson frequently writes about science and technology's relationship to ethics and social issues. Business Insider sat down with him and talked about math, war, the human brain, the education system, and the Orion Project. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Elena Holodny: Who has most inspired you in either math or science? Dick Feynman ... he has now become famous, to my great joy, because when I knew him he was completely unknown. But I recognized him as being something special. He was only for a short time at Cornell when I was a student and he was a young professor. So I didn't work with him, but I just sat at his feet, literally, and listened to him talk. He was a clown, of course, and also a genius. It was a good combination.

Have you ever wondered how much time you lose each year commuting during rush hour, or driving to a weekend getaway in holiday traffic, or even to the supermarket? That's how much time the average American spends behind the wheel each year, according to a new study the traffic safety organization released Thursday. But the American Driving Survey, the second of its kind, comes as driving culture, already undergoing significant change, is poised to take another significant leap. Not only are fewer younger, urban-dwelling Americans driving or owning cars, according to AAA, but new and traditional automakers are also in a race to develop driverless vehicles. At least 19 automakers aim to develop autonomous car technology by 2020, and some transportation analysts predict that in 25 years Americans will start giving up their cars for self-driving vehicles. More productivity, says Peter Stone, a computer science professor that studies traffic congestion, and is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin.

"The right message, to the right user, at the right time," is the gold standard for advertisers. Entire industries, including internet empires, are built on the foundation of advertising dollars, and targeted advertising allows companies to connect people with content in a very granular way. Many of the ads you see online are tailored based on the information you share, knowingly or unknowingly. Your personal data feeds into to a multi-billion dollar industry of profiling and targeted advertising that includes not only information you shared directly, but also characteristics that are gleaned by analyzing aggregate data and behavior. Your race is among many characteristics that can be inferred and used to serve you personalized content.

Data scientists have a variety of different skills that they bring to bear on Big Data projects. One valuable skill that is becoming popular in data science is machine learning. Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates model building that allows computers to find hidden insights without being explicitly programmed to find a particular insight. Machine learning can be applied to data to help businesses quickly find clusters of similar objects (e.g., identify segments of customers) and to predict outcomes (e.g., identify customers who are at-risk of churning). While machine learning is a hot skill to possess, a recent study by Evans Data Corp. found that about a third of developers (36%) who are working on Big Data projects employ elements of machine learning.

The system is called Recognition and will be running for three months in London up to 27 November 2016, both online and in a small exhibition at the Tate. A nice touch is that it will also take in feedback from matching selections made by viewers themselves at the art museum on Millbank. Created by Fabrica, it's the winner of the IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, awarded by Tate Britain, in partnership with Microsoft. You can see it in action above, in the match of LS Lowry's Industrial Landscape (from 1955) with a recent construction image of Changi Airport in Singapore… Apparently, Recognition employs multiple artificial intelligence technologies. For example, there is natural language processing to interpret image captions and text, analysing context and subject matter.

A Japanese team comprising Tokyo-based startup ispace and Tohoku University expects to complete its moon-bound robot contestant for Google Inc.'s exploration contest by next January. Hakuto will compete against 15 other teams from around the world to win the Google Lunar X Prize, the world's first private-sector competition to explore the lunar surface. The teams will send probes developed with money and technology from the private sector to the moon, get them to travel 500 meters or farther on its dusty surface, and transmit 360-degree images back to Earth. The first team to complete the mission will win the grand prize of 20 million. While the deadline for completing the mission is the end of 2017, none of the teams has landed a probe there yet.