Young adults of the'Tinder generation' are having less sex than any generation since the 1920s, a study suggests. Experts have assumed that people born in the 1990s - known as'Millennials' - were more promiscuous than those who came before, due to the availability and popularity of dating apps such as Tinder and Gridr. But scientists at Florida Atlantic University have found that people aged 20 to 24 today are more likely to abstain from sex than any generation for 90 years. Some 15 per cent percent of this age group in the US have had no sexual partners since turning 18, the researchers found. Of those born in the 1960s, only 6 per cent had not had sex when they were at the same age.

Machine learning, virtual or augmented reality and the Internet of Things have captured the general public's attention (if not yet their pocketbooks), and developers are taking full advantage of all the new technology that will shape humanity's future. A quarterly survey of over 16,500 developers by VisionMobile said that 41% of software builders are now involved in data science or machine learning in one capacity or another. About 33% do so in a professional capacity. According to VisionMobile's State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 report, developers are inspired by emerging technologies, irrespective of the level of media hype leveled at any one particular industry trend. Machine learning is slowly coming to the mainstream (think chat bots, natural language understanding and photo apps that understand what they see) but 67% of all developers see it as a viable side project, although they are still learning the ropes.

Laura Hatfield and Sherri Rose are Assistant Professors specializing in biostatistics at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Health Care Policy. Laura received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota and Sherri completed her PhD in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. They are developing novel statistical methods for health policy problems. Rose: I'd definitely say a statistician. Even when I'm working on things that fall into the categories of data science or machine learning, there's underlying statistical theory guiding that process, be it for methods development or applications.

There are various thought leaders who believe that we are experiencing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. I am certain that healthcare will be the lead industrial area of such a revolution and one of the major catalysts for change is going to be artificial intelligence. With the evolution of digital capacity, more and more data is produced and stored in the digital space. The amount of available digital data is growing by a mind-blowing speed, doubling every two year. In 2013, it encompassed 4.4 zettabytes, however by 2020 the digital universe – the data we create and copy annually – will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes (!).

How long until the first machine reaches superintelligence? Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly, and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Those people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon -- that exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades. Others, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge [and the transition will actually take much more time] ... The Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that's happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they'd compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow-growing seedling of the internet in 1985 and argued that there was no way it would amount to anything impactful in the near future. The doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress.

A Florida-based company has won U.S. government permission to send a robotic lander to the moon next year. The move is the first time the United States has cleared a private space mission to fly beyond Earth's orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration's unprecedented go-ahead for the Moon Express mission also sets a legal and regulatory framework for a host of other commercial expeditions to the moon, asteroids and Mars. The Florida-based company Moon Express, which is partnering with Nasa, hopes to send scientific payloads to the Moon, in the hopes to eventually provide commercial services. Artist's impression of Moon Express lander on surface of the moon pictured The moon is a'treasure chest' of lucrative materials.

A fully reprogrammable quantum computer has been built and tested for the first time. The test marks a milestone in the development of powerful problem-solving machines that harness the strange properties of sub-atomic particles. At the heart of the device are just five ions - electrically charged atoms - trapped in a magnetic field, which are vibrated by precisely targeted laser beams. A fully reprogrammable quantum compute r(pictured) has been built and tested for the first time. At the heart of the device are just five ions - electrically charged atoms - trapped in a magnetic field, which are vibrated by precisely targeted laser beams.

The self-assembling shape shifting killer robots from the Terminator films could be a step closer, thanks to the development of self-propelling liquid metals. A team of Australian researchers is laying the groundwork for T-1000s by creating the basis of soft electric circuits. Unlike modern circuitry found in electronic devices, which remain based on circuits with solid state components, future connections could be much more flexible and able to move and reconfigure as necessary. A team at RMIT University in Melbourne used non-toxic alloys of the metal gallium, which is liquid at close to room temperature. By adding droplets of the alloy galinstan to water and changing the pH, they were able to make the drops move about freely.

They might be tall, dark and handsome but men on the dating app Tinder suffer from low self-esteem, a study found. A survey of more than 1,300 men and women revealed that those who use the highly popular smartphone app tend to be less happy with their looks. Psychologists warn the app could be bad for your health, with users drawn into a downward spiral of physical comparisons. Researchers looked at more than 1,300 undergraduate students and asked them to complete questionnaires based on psychological state. They found that one in ten of them used the Tinder app.

We have all received a tweet that we're not sure is sarcastic or just plain mean. Now scientists have built a neural network to detect'the lowest form of wit' on Twitter. It does this by putting a social media message in context and if a message seems to disagree with the majority of messages about a topic, the writer is probably being sarcastic. Scientists have built a neural network to detect'the lowest form of wit' on Twitter. The neural network seeks to identify sarcastic comments by first finding the user's'embeddings' which include contextual cues such as the content of previous tweets and their interests.