The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is to begin trialing a chatbot app for dispensing medical advice, with the aim of reducing the burden on its 111 non-emergency helpline. The 111 service went live in 2013, and serves as the first port of call for urgent advice in cases where it's likely overkill to scream for an ambulance right away -- if you've misread a prescription and taken more pills than you should've, for example. The AI-powered app could become another alternative, questioning users about their medical matter and symptoms before suggesting the best course of action. The NHS is developing the app with Babylon Health, one of the new breed of paid, doctor on-demand services. It's actually being adapted from Babylon's existing mobile app, which features a chatbot-like symptom questionnaire users interact with before being connected with a general practitioner (GP) via video call.

To the editor: Professor of neuroscience Robert M. Sapolsky blathers on about what "we" imagine as the course of our lives, which he speaks of as "evolving," when properly, despite new cells in our bodies constantly being formed to replace worn-out ones, he might have used the notion of development. He fails to account for the unknown quality of a consistent consciousness, clearly visible in the eyes of 6- or 7-month-old babies in strollers passing by daily. My neurons may be in constant process of exchanging old for new; but I for example am the very "same" person who resigned from the Cub Scouts at the age of 10 when I was told to wear a uniform and be like Sapolsky's "we." As though his subject wasn't our physical processes, Sapolsky concludes with propaganda based on his resolution to resist our political future under Donald Trump, saying he feels despair and wants "us" to struggle with him alongside the elites of the routed Democratic Party. He himself will not change, so I leave him to his "despair," poor man.

While we're used to seeing laser weapons in the Star Wars films, the futuristic technology could soon be a reality for the UK military. The UK Ministry of Defence has awarded a £30 million ($37 million) contract to create a laser weapon which can track targets at distances and operate in varied weather conditions. If the prototype is successful, the UK's first laser weapons could come into service by the mid-2020s. While the MoD has not specificed whether the laser could be used for any specific threats, director energy weapons could have a range of used. The MoD has partnered with Dragonfire, a UK industrial team to create the laser weapon.

Following the Arkansas hot tub murder case that has reignited the debate around privacy rights issues, activists are advocating the need to set protocols for technology providers to deter mass surveillance by the government and law enforcement agencies. In the Arkansas hot tub murder case, James Andrew Bates is currently on trial. Bates is accused of murdering his friend Victor Collins, who was found dead in a hot tub in Bates' home in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2015. Local authorities issued a warrant as they sought assistance from Amazon to release any audio or records from an Amazon Echo device that Bates owned. Following the footsteps of Apple, who similarly resisted handing over private user data to the FBI when the agency asked the company to unlock the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Amazon also reportedly declined to give authorities the Echo data logged on its servers.

At the end of the exchange, the app will advise a patient on how to proceed, an alternative to the advice of 111 call-handlers who are able to send ambulances, book an out-of-hours doctor or suggest other treatment. The trial is seen as a potential solution to the strain on the 111 service. Interactions with the app are significantly cheaper and quicker than speaking over the phone. It is hoped that the database of medical information that Babylon has could mean more effective advice than the 111 staff who are not medical professionals, although many users may have misgivings about the effectiveness of medical advice from a chatbot.

When Donald Trump met with technology leaders in December to tell them he wanted them to create jobs in the US, their heads probably tilted to the side, as if you tried to explain physics to your dog and she just watched your lips moving and wondered when, among all those unfamiliar sounds, she was going to hear the word "treat". They're in business to help us do more with less. They like innovation and disruption and software eating the world but people – er, not so much. In his own Chance-the-gardener way, the President-elect might be on to something. His victory was a middle-finger salute from those who feeling left out by technology and globalisation.

Delivery driver jobs would be at less risk, CEA forecast says. The proliferation of self-driving, or autonomous, tractor-trailers threaten the jobs of nearly 1.7 million commercial truck drivers, according to a study published late last month by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The study, released Dec. 20, said the jobs of between 1.34 million and 1.67 million truck drivers would be at risk due to the growing utilization of heavy-duty vehicles operated via artificial intelligence. That would equal 80 to 100 percent of all driver jobs listed in the CEA report, which is based on May 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Department of Labor. There are about 3.4 million commercial truck drivers currently operating in the U.S., according to various estimates.

NASA missions come packaged two ways. They're either deep explorations of the familiar--STEREO's focus on the sun, the International Space Station's study of what microgravity does to the human body--or a trip to some crazy place no one has ever seen before. But still, any strange, distant object the agency targets will likely hold some clue about the origins of life. Humans are spacefaring narcissists that way. NASA's newly announced Lucy and Psyche missions fall squarely into the second category.

The problem of outlier detection is extremely challenging in many domains such as text, in which the attribute values are typically non-negative, and most values are zero. In such cases, it often becomes difficult to separate the outliers from the natural variations in the patterns in the underlying data. In this paper, we present a matrix factorization method, which is naturally able to distinguish the anomalies with the use of low rank approximations of the underlying data. Our iterative algorithm TONMF is based on block coordinate descent (BCD) framework. We define blocks over the term-document matrix such that the function becomes solvable. Given most recently updated values of other matrix blocks, we always update one block at a time to its optimal. Our approach has significant advantages over traditional methods for text outlier detection. Finally, we present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness of our method over competing methods.

The UK's National Health Service will soon begin a trial testing whether or not a chatbot can effectively replace a call center for non-emergency medical triage, according to a report from the Financial Times. Babylon, a UK-based telemedicine startup, will power the six-month trial in north-central London, which will include 1.2 million covered citizens. Babylon is a major telemedicine provider in its native England. The company's direct-to-consumer offering starts with an AI-powered chatbot which can escalate up to a video visit if necessary. Triage via Babylon requires about 12 text messages and takes about a minute and a half.