In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for artificial intelligence (A.I.) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) allows anyone from ambitious amateur coders to advanced computer scientists to build and test artificial intelligence in the "Minecraft" environment. "We?re trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions," Katja Hofmann, the project's lead researcher, said in a Microsoft blog post announcing the release.

Whether you read past the first line in this article or not is your choice, but inside your skull this decision will be accompanied by a buzz of activity in your neurons. But trying to pin down something as intangible as free will to a region of the brain is tricky, with most studies showing response to commands, rather than a choice made by someone's own volition. Now a team of neuroscientists in the US claim to have caught the brain in the act, capturing the activity right at the point it makes a decision – effectively pinpointing free will in the brain. Using functional MRI scans, researchers were able to show which regions showed a surge in activity which caused a boost of oxygen rich blood to the regions. Using functional MRI scans, scientists showed which brain regions had a surge in activity before a free decision is made.

He is one of the greatest artists of all time, famed for his detailed portraits that helped cement his reputation as one of the Dutch Old Masters. But when it came to his self portraits, Rembrandt van Rijn appears to have needed a bit of technological help getting his depictions just right. The 17th century artist might have used a combination of mirrors and lenses to project his faceonto a surface, allowing him to trace the outline, according to new research. Rembrandt's self portraits are well-known for being highly detailed, and the Dutch painter often favoured himself as his subject (self portrait pictured). Known for his self-portraits and biblical scenes, his early work was small but rich in detail; religious and allegorical themes were prominent.

In one month from now, the second edition of the Data Science Game, an international competition of data science for students, will start (more info here). Students in last year of Masters or PhDs from all around the world will be challenged through an online competion (June 17 to July 10) and a final hackathon (september 10-11). The first 20 teams of the online phase will come to Paris to demonstrate their skills and abilities to solve a data science challenge and meet professional data scientists coming from leading companies in Data Science (Microsoft, CapGemini, Axa Data Innovation Lab, etc.). We think our participants would love to learn from your data challenge experience since you were the former top ranked kaggler. But first of all, can you quickly introduce yourself?

The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests. The test currently can't determine if a person is talking to another human being or a robot if the person being interrogated simply chooses to stay silent, new research shows. While it's not news that the Turing test has flaws, the new study highlights just how limited the test is for answering deeper questions about artificial intelligence, said study co-author Kevin Warwick, a computer scientist at Coventry University in England. "As machines are getting more and more intelligent, whether they're actually thinking and whether we need to give them responsibilities are starting to become very serious questions," Warwick told Live Science. "Obviously, the Turing test is not the one which can tease them out." The now-famous Turing test was first described by British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to address questions of when and how to determine if machines are sentient.

We entered the VentureBeat Botathon contest in SF, and after lots of weekend hacking, we won! Our entry is Botender, a bot that helps you order at a restaurant, log what you order to Fitbit for your diet tracking and even pay for your food and drinks. Now Omar Sharif and I are one of 6 international finalists for the Botathon competition, selected from regional hackathons and an online contest. Tomorrow the final choice is made, during the VentureBeat MobileBeat event. Pingpad has Pingbot, a Slack bot that gets smarter every day in it's quest to help teams capture shared knowledge and act on it.

Learning needs to be less like memorization, and more like…Angry Birds. Half of school dropouts name boredom as the number one reason they left. The post is about why the future of education will be about flipping our current model on its head and about how key exponential technologies like AI, VR and gamification are going to drive a revolution in education. In the traditional education system, you start at an "A," and every time you get something wrong, your score gets lower and lower. You start with zero, and every time you come up with something right, your score gets higher and higher. It completely flips the way we currently learn, and it's addictively fun.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released in 2011, about 820,000 women and men aged 15-24 were newly infected with HIV in developing countries. Over 60% of these were women. Among so many other challenges, developing countries are plagued with serious reproductive health illnesses such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and complications from childbirth. A key priority for policymakers, researchers, and health care providers working in developing nations is to emphasize prevention and distribution of information about STIs and other reproductive tract infections (RTIs). This report on Improving Reproductive Health in Developing Countries from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences contains additional information on the topic.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Everyone has heard of Kaggle, but have you heard of London-based Google DeepMind? Their researchers build deep learning algorithms to conquer everything from Pong and the ancient game of go to blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy. If the latter sounds particularly familiar, you may be recalling the Diabetic Retinopathy Detection competition which ran on Kaggle from February 2015 to July 2015. In this blog post, I interview Jeffrey De Fauw who came in 5th place in this competition using convolutional neural networks and is first author of Google DeepMind's study spearheading efforts to automate analysis of ophthalmic images using machine learning in order to help clinicians diagnose sight-threatening diseases. He explains how he got started on Kaggle, how it led him to his current role at DeepMind, and what he's learned along the way.