The Beatles may have ended decades ago, but AI is making good (if derivative) hits that sound an awful lot like something off "Revolver." Sony CSL Research Laboratory is releasing an album next year of songs written by Artificial intelligence, and the first hit track may be this uncanny number programmed in the style of The Beatles (in all honesty it sounds a little more like The Beach Boys to me, at least through the intro). The effort was not totally computer generated, of course. French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced the harmonies for the songs. He also wrote the lyrics.

Artificial Intelligence is already operating in a range of limited but interesting ways across the healthcare sector. The use of processing computers that can sift and sort data hundreds if not thousands of times quicker than humans is growing, with research suggesting that we spent around 2 billion in venture backed capital on it in 2015. But where is its use likely to impact healthcare in the next decade or so, with reports predicting spending on AI in healthcare will reach as much as 20 Billion in 10 years time? Before we look at applications in healthcare in particular, we should remember that AI is an umbrella term for three related technologies; machine learning, extended human cognition and robotics. AI is quite a broad field and in this regard the impact on healthcare as one large industry is likely to be significant, especially in being able to be major new platform/systems leveraging by SAAS systems and databases intelligently talking to each other.

Even though bio-medicine was quick to make use of robotics and internet of things, its adoption of artificial intelligence has been slow and limited. However, with Microsoft aiming to develop cancer solutions with the help of artificial intelligence, things may change quickly. The US-based technology giant announced on Tuesday that it would be using machine learning to analyse tumour and developing new medication regimes besides working on its project "moonshot" which will help it create biological cells that can be programmed like computers. Though it all seems very ambitious at the moment, if successful, Microsoft would be able to treat cancer like a computer code, where programmed cells mutate to counter cancer. While targeted medicine is something that IBM is also doing, with its Watson Oncology project, the programmable cell would be the first such initiative.

Two-factor authentication: Learn these words well and you'll feel better when giant hacks splatter passwords and email addresses all over the dark web. Yahoo conceded Thursday that information linked to 500 million user accounts has been leaked by hackers. If you're one of the people affected, there's not much you can do about your email address, phone numbers and date of birth spreading online. But you certainly can take steps to ensure bad actors won't be able to wriggle their way into your accounts using that information. It's unfortunate that "two-factor authentication" mostly sounds like a safe-sex practice for robots in an Isaac Asimov novel.

Not every scientific study can be about weighty topics, like gravity waves or gene editing. Sometimes you can gain a true scientific insight by discovering that mammals of vastly different sizes require roughly the same amount of time to empty their bladders, or by noticing that people who speak 10 disparate languages all came up with a version of the word "Huh." These awards are bestowed every fall by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research. There are 10 winners in a range of categories, which typically include fields like physics, neuroscience and mathematics (but which also may include entomology, safety engineering, fluid dynamics or acoustics). The prize-winning scholarship may sound silly, but that doesn't mean it's trivial.

LinkedIn is one of the more popular sites on the Web -- the go-to place for job searches and professional connections. Now the social network is making a big push to change that. The company, which said it was being acquired by Microsoft earlier this year, launched a wholesale redesign of its platform on Thursday. Brimming with buzzy social features like chatbots, hashtags, and breaking news notifications, it's the company's latest attempt to become a place people visit every day. Roughly 105 million people visit LinkedIn every month, compared to Twitter's 313 million monthly active users and Facebook's massive 1.7 billion audience.

Google's machine learning platform might be a few years from solving any of the world's major problems, but for one farming family in Japan, the TensorFlow platform has already reduced the amount of time spent sorting cucumbers into standards. Makoto Koike, a former embedded systems designer, implemented the TensorFlow platform into his family's cucumber farm. See Also: Are big data analytics more important than the cloud? The goal was reducing the amount of time his parents spend sorting cucumbers, which can reach eight hours per day at peak harvest. Koike crafted an Arduino powered conveyer belt and connected it to a Raspberry Pi 3 processor. Webcams hanging above the belt take low resolution photos of the cucumbers, which are sent to the cloud and assigned a standard.

There were two "tracks" for agents to compete on, offering very different challenges. Track 1 featured a map known to the teams, and rocket launchers were the only weapons. The agents started with a weapon but were able to collect ammo and health kits. Track 2 was a far harder challenge. It featured three maps, unknown to teams, and a full array of weapons and items.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have laid out plans to invest 3bn over the next 10 years with the not insignificant goal of tackling all diseases. "Can we cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of this century?" The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will focus on some of the world's biggest killers, including heart disease, cancer, infectious diseases and neurological diseases. One of its biggest investments is to be a 600m "Biohub" at UCSF, which will bring together scientists and engineers from Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF – who haven't collaborated in this way before – to develop tools to treat diseases. The second focus will be transformative technology, all of which will be made available to all scientists everywhere. "Throughout the history of science, most of the major scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by some new tool and technology that allows you to see in new ways," explained Zuckerberg.

The Smart and Scalable Urban Traffic Control system is a real-time, smart IoT-enabled adaptive traffic control system (in the sense of the Internet of Smart Intersections) that optimally schedules dynamic traffic flows in complex urban road networks, by integrating traffic theory with artificial intelligence (AI). Dr. Xie is the lead inventor of the system. He created the core control engine (the brain) of the system, including schedule-driven intersection control (SchIC) and decentralized coordination mechanisms. He has also designed and realized all strengthening strategies of the system to enable its real-world operations. Some extended work also includes: multi-modal urban traffic control (integrated with machine learning and computer vision techniques), integration with decentralized route choice framework, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication with connected vehicles, energy efficiency optimization, and data-driven congestion and incident management.