A new age is dawning. Whether it is a wonderful one or a terrible one remains to be seen. Look around and the signs of dizzying technological progress are difficult to miss. Driverless cars and drones, not long ago the stuff of science fiction, are now oddities that can occasionally be spotted in the wild and which will soon be a commonplace in cities around the world. With a few flicks of a finger, we can use our phones to order up a meal, or a car, or a translation for a waiter's query in a foreign country. Gadgets such as the Amazon Echo are finding their way into living rooms, where they sit listening, ready to comply with a voice command. Just a few years ago, one could dismiss the digital age as consisting of little more than social networks and cat videos; no longer.

Two years after an anomaly caused one of its rockets to explode just seconds after liftoff, the American spaceflight company Orbital ATK is ready to launch another cargo resupply vehicle to the International Space Station. At 8:03 p.m. EDT on Sunday, an Antares rocket carrying a fully-stocked Cygnus spacecraft will lift off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. "After being launched into low-Earth orbit, the Cygnus spacecraft will use its advanced maneuvering capability to transport the cargo from a low parking orbit to the space station, where it will be grappled by the crew using the station's robotic arm and berthed to the space station," the company explained in a statement released Saturday. "After the cargo is removed and disposal items are loaded, Cygnus will depart from the station in mid-November." Among the payloads the Cygnus spacecraft is carrying is an experiment named Spacecraft Fire Experiment-II, or Saffire-II.

Good aim, at the wrong target, is always a miss. This describes much of the current work in Artificial Intelligence: Brilliant minds, clever programmers, amazing algorithms, all pointed at the wrong target with stupefying aim. Despite their brilliance, cleverness, and coding, someone will get hurt if we continue pursuing the type of AI in vogue. A few weeks ago, Google put out guidance for research on preventing harm from AI. This last week, the Federal Government did the same.

Nathan Copeland is telling a researcher which of his fingers he feels a touch on. But the researcher is touching a robotic hand, not Copeland's, whose hand hasn't felt a thing in over a decade. In this "proof of principle" experiment, a man whose spinal injury removed all sensation from his limbs was able to "feel" pressure on several robotic digits connected directly to his brain. It's a long way from a cybernetic hand, but it opens the possibility of using one to even more of those who need it. That said, this is still important research because it skips a step many other prosthetics rely on: the peripheral nervous system.

Humanity may still be years if not decades away from producing sentient artificial intelligence. But with the rise of machine-learning services in our smartphones and other devices, one type of narrow, specialized AI has become all the rage. And the research on this branch of AI is only accelerating. In fact, as more industries and policymakers awaken to the benefits of machine learning, two countries appear to be pulling away in the research race. The results will likely have significant implications for the future of AI.

Since the human genome was successfully mapped in 2003, researchers have been making use of technology to organise the growing mountain of genomics data into a form that will eventually benefit actual patients. When he unveiled the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, US president Barack Obama recognised the potential that technology and gene mapping can bring to patients. His state of the union address laid out a vision for the groundbreaking initiative: "Doctors have always recognised that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type - that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard?"

I think this application is kind of fascinating. There is a probability distribution mainatined on the board of possible ship locations, and samples are made based on this estimate. This "solves" battleship in a way. But I believe it uses a monte-carlo search to get the probability densities. A properly trained CNN might be able to do this in a single forward pass.

President Barack Obama sees the government playing a role in the development of AI. In an interview with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, President Obama said the government should facilitate a range of research in artificial intelligence. "The way I've been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom," he says. "The government should add a relatively light touch, investing heavily in research and making sure there's a conversation between basic research and applied research." That means the government should help provide a path for getting AI into the real world.

A novel design for robots allows them to "sweat", greatly improving thermal and mechanical integrity. The bot from SCHAFT was a top scorer in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in 2013. The University of Tokyo's JSK Lab's Kengoro is a 1.7-meter (5.6 feet) tall, 56-kilogram (123 pounds) musculoskeletal humanoid crammed to the brim with circuit boards and 108 motors. These structural components generate a lot of heat which would constrain the bot's performance, and there wasn't much room for any cooling mechanisms. JSK lab developed Kengoro's 3-D frame to be porous, capable of maintaining a system of flowing water.

Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at yesterday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.