Video games aren't just for fun – they can make a political point, too. Responding to current affairs is a growing trend in gaming, and it is more evident than ever in the run-up to the US presidential election. There are dozens of Donald Trump-themed indie titles on PC game store Steam. And bigger developers are also incorporating political themes in their games. Chris Baker, a former creative director at news and entertainment website Buzzfeed, launched GOP Arcade with a friend this year.

High-speed body scanners powered by advanced artificial intelligence are to be trialled across US airports and subway stations. According to The Guardian, documents filed by Evolv Technology with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) show plans to test the new systems at Denver International airport, Los Angeles' Union Station metro and Union Station in Washington DC. Evolv's scanners use millimetre-wave radio frequencies to scan a person's body. This setup is currently used by the full-body scanners found in airports, but whereas those devices slow down the screening process, the new scanners can finish their work in a fraction of a second. This means individuals can simply walk through the gate without having to stop.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently announced a $3 billion effort to cure all disease during the lifetime of their daughter, Max. Earlier this year, Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker donated $250 million to increase collaboration amongst researchers to develop immune therapies for cancer. Google is developing contact lenses for diabetic glucose monitoring; gathering genetic data to create a picture of what a healthy human should be; and working to increase human longevity. The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing.

Researchers with the Army and General Dynamics Land Systems are now testing concept vehicles for a Stryker-mounted laser weapon to protect soldiers from missiles, mortars, and artillery. A UK-developed system capable of jamming signals to small drones is going to be trialed by the US aviation authority. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules.

Companies have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for them for years, with little success. Pepper, a humanoid machine carrying the hopes of SoftBank Group Corp.'s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, was supposed to change that. Promoted as the first robot to be endowed with emotions, the company marketed Pepper aggressively after it was unveiled in 2014, promising the gadget was sophisticated enough for tasks usually handled by shop clerks, receptionists and translators. "It's not there to have a conversation," said Junichi Nishi, a municipal government official in Fujieda, a city of about 140,000 in central Japan. "We use it primarily as a tablet," he said, referring to the touch screen attached to the robot's chest.

Recently we wrote about the development of AI and neural nets beyond the second generation Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Nets (CNNs / RNNs) which have come on so strong and dominate the current conversation about deep learning. Our research shows that the next generation of neural nets is most likely to be led by Spiking Neural Nets (SNNs) that are a return to the'strong' AI tradition and closely mimic actual brain function. Unlike CNNs that fire signals to every one of their deep layer connections every time, SNNs are modeled after the fact that in the brain neurons do not constantly communicate with one another. Rather they communicate in spikes of signals or more correctly short trains of spiking signals. As each spike in the train arrives at a neuron it raises the potential of that neuron until finally a spike arrives that tips it over its potential threshold and it in turn fires, propelling the signal onward.

The U.S. government wants to find out if artificial intelligence can help doctors diagnose and treat breast cancer more effectively. In an effort to find targeted treatments for particularly invasive types of breast cancer that don't respond well to existing drugs, the Department of Defense announced this week that it is enlisting the biopharma company Berg Health to use AI for drug discovery. The partnership supports the White House's Cancer Moonshot initiative to screen up to 250,000 patient samples in search of new biological indicators, or biomarkers, of the earliest signs of cancer. While the death rate from breast cancer has dropped steadily over the past two decades, it remains the second-biggest killer among cancers in U.S. women, according to the National Cancer Institute. Under the partnership, Berg will have access to the DoD's Clinical Breast Care Project, a bank of 13,600 samples of both healthy and diseased tissue from nearly 8,000 patients.

You've ordered a robot online and are booting it up at home. At first the bot doesn't do much of anything; it simply follows you around and observes your daily routine: walking the dog, making lasagna, washing the dishes. But before long the bot has learned to be your surrogate, shouldering quotidian tasks so you can focus on more interesting ones. That's the world envisioned by Suzanne Gildert and Geordie Rose. They run Kindred, an ultra-secretive artificial intelligence company based in Vancouver and funded in part by Google's venture capital arm.

GPU's Role in Artificial Intelligence Advances Featured at Conference By Wayne Rash Posted 2016-10-26 Print NEWS ANALYSIS: The confluence of big data, massively powerful computing resources and advanced algorithms is bringing new artificial intelligence capabilities to scientific research. WASHINGTON, D.C.--Massively parallel supercomputing hardware and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms are being harnessed to deliver powerful new research tools in science and medicine, according to Dr. France A. Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation. Córdova spoke Oct. 26 at the GPU Technology Conference organized by Nvidia, a company that got its start making video cards for PCs and gaming systems and now manufactures advanced graphics processors for high-performance servers and supercomputers. Córdova, who is directing long-term research in AI at the NSF, said the research there is being used already in the Cancer Moonshot project currently spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. The Cancer Moonshot is a major effort to focus resources and funding on the fight to cure cancer on a scale similar to the original mission by NASA to land on the moon.

Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the U.S. presidential race, it was easy to miss the Obama administration's release this month of a slim, 48-page report titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Yet the subject of the report -- and the changes it foreshadows -- may prove to be as consequential for our society, and our education system, as even the most high-stakes national election. The term "artificial intelligence" means different things to different people, but broadly speaking, it refers to computers and advanced machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans, respond to novel or nuanced situations as a person might, and most critically, learn from experiences as a human would. According to a recent survey, 80 percent of AI researchers believe that computers and advanced machines will eventually achieve levels of artificial intelligence that rival human intelligence. Moreover, half believe that this will happen by the year 2040 -- just one generation from now.