Google does not have regulatory approval for its NHS healthcare deal. Two weeks ago, New Scientist revealed that Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind has access to the personal medical information of millions of UK patients through a data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. A New Scientist investigation has found that the project is being carried out without the ethical and regulatory approval that experts say are required. Google and the Royal Free both claim to be acting in compliance with the rules as they interpret them. A collaboration between DeepMind and the NHS has the potential to do great things.

Space travel brings with it a list of potential dangers, but astronaut Tim Peake added one more on Thursday: paint chips. Often asked if @Space_Station is hit by space debris. Yes – this chip is in a Cupola window https://t.co/iH87Dt80yV The International Space Station (ISS) was struck sometime last month by a flake of paint or small metal fragment that caused a chip in the windows of the Cupola, "the best room with a view anywhere," the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a press release. Besides its official duty as the control room for the ISS's robotic arms, the Cupola room also serves as an observation area for astronauts on board to get a good view of Earth and approaching spacecraft.

The future of health care is wearable devices that transmit our vitals to our physicians. Instead of self-reported data, which is often inaccurate (no offense, but your memory just kind of sucks), doctors will have real numbers to form the basis for diagnoses and treatment plans. In the wake of Apple's CareKit launch, connected medical device maker Qardio is launching a platform to share health data from its hardware with your doctor. QardioArm is a medical-grade smart blood pressure monitor that can send data to your doctor. The company has two FDA-approved products for consumers: the smart blood pressure monitor QardioArm and wireless scale QardioBase.

Apple made the surprise announcement Friday it is making a 1 billion investment in Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, which is Uber's main competitor in China. It is unlikely Apple is interested in concerning itself with the ins and outs of the Chinese ride-hailing app market, but it has lots to gain from its big investment. It already commands almost 90 percent of the market in China, where Uber is losing 1 billion per year to simply retain its slice of the market. While Apple's 1 billion is Didi's single largest investment, the company's current funding round is oversubscribed, and it has the backing of the deep pockets of Alibaba and Tencent. That said, Didi was never going to turn down an investment from Apple, which brings with it so much more than a mere cash injection.

It was a public engagement exercise that turned into a national row after a public poll to name a new British research vessel saw the name Boaty McBoatface get the most support. But Google has had a cheeky dig at the humourless officials in the British government who objected to the name by calling its latest artificial intelligence software Parsey McParseface. The technology firm, which has just become the world's largest company, has released software that uses sophisticated machine learning to analyse the linguistic structure of language. Parsey McParseface uses sophisticated machine learning algorithms to analyse linguistic structure of sentences to help computers to understand how human languages are constructed. An example of of how the software decodes the sentence'I booked a ticket to Google' is pictured It forms part of an open-source neural network aimed at training computers to understand how human languages are put together so they can be processed. It announced the English version of this system is called Parsey McParseface in a blog that outlined how it hopes the software will transform artificial intelligence.

When an unidentified object hit a British Airways A320 on the nose on its approach to Heathrow last month, the encounter was widely believed the fault of some dope who had flown his drone into busy airspace, endangering the lives of the 137 people aboard the jet. "It was bound to happen," the British Airline Pilots Association said. This time, the errant "drone" was actually a plastic bag, but the FAA isn't sitting around, waiting for a next time. This month, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it's expanding its Pathfinder Program, which it created to detect and identify drones flying too close to airports. To make that happen, the agency's conducting joint research with a number of companies to identify the technology that might be used to spot, block, and drop the unwanted unmanned aircraft systems.

Bookmark this page by right-clicking here and choosing "Add to Favorites" The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is requesting information on research related to the investigation and characterization of fundamental limits of machine learning with supportive theoretical foundations. Although the main focus is on machine learning, extensions and implications for human-machine systems are also of interest. The notion of fundamental limits here means that the conclusion about achievable performance limits should hold independent of specific learning methods or algorithms.

Robots have transformed the lives of tradesmen and laborers, but lawyers, architects, and doctors tend to believe that their careers are safe from the advances of artificial intelligence. This belief is entirely wrong, according to the upcoming book, Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts. The authors, Richard Susskind, UK government advisor and visiting professor at Oxford Internet Institute, and his son Daniel Susskind, lecturer at Oxford University, have conducted a hundred interviews and drawn on economic and sociological theory to reach their challenging conclusion: AI will dramatically transform the middle-class working landscape. In the near-term, the Susskinds argue, artificial intelligence will simply accelerate the efficiency of professions. But then robots will start to take over more work, and humans will find the roles of "doctor" or "lawyer" replaced with such less glamorous-sounding titles as "empathizer," "knowledge engineer," or "system provider."

The German transport ministry says General Motors' Opel division has been asked to appear before a commission looking into diesel emissions controls after an environmental group claimed two of its models are able to reduce pollution controls. The environmental group, DUH, says it has tested Opel's Zafira and Astra models and claims they reduce pollution controls at some speeds and temperatures. DUH wants them taken off the road. Opel says DUH's tests weren't objective or scientifically grounded, saying "our software was never designed to cheat or deceive." Apparently referring to the computer expert who examined the software for DUH, the company said that "the isolated conclusions of a hacker do not reflect the complex interdependencies of a modern exhaust after-treatment system."

Google has revealed the most powerful computer for understanding the English language in the world – and called it Parsey McParseFace. The technology, which is built on the more sensibly named TensorFlow and SyntaxNet frameworks, is a powerful tool that uses new artificial intelligence technology to be able to analyse the linguistic structure of language, and understand what each part of a sentence does to its meaning. Google is making the tool open source, so that anybody can use it for free. But it will probably go down in history because of its silly name. Google said that the name – a reference to the controversial Boaty McBoatface – was a suggestion that came while it was trying to name the new technology, and that it didn't have any better alternatives.