Now you feel it, now you don't What determines the detection of a sensory stimulus? To address this question, Takahashi et al. combined in vivo two-photon imaging, electrophysiology, optogenetics, and behavioral analysis in a study of mice. Calcium signals in apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons in the somatosensory cortex controlled the perceptual threshold of the mice's whiskers. Strong reduction of dendritic calcium signaling impaired the perceptual detection threshold so that an identical stimulus could no longer be noticed.

There has been no shortage of promises recently about how deeply the application of machine-driven artificial intelligence is expected to change our society in the next decade. Microsoft announced its ambition to conquer cancer using natural language processing to analyze research papers in close to real time. Google--now a self-proclaimed AI-first company--will make computers sound just like humans by applying machine learning to a vast corpus of human voice samples. Facebook is using AI to analyze satellite footage to locate all human life and fulfill its promise to bring the internet to the world's entire population. And the list goes on.

Over the past year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took on a new project: building a home artificial intelligence (AI) system. His AI assistant, Jarvis, who makes toast for his wife Priscilla and plays music for his daughter Max, is voiced by none other than actor and beekeeper Morgan Freeman. Zuckerberg's goal for 2016 was to create an AI system "to run my home and help me with my work." His project seems to have been quite a success: Jarvis responds to the Zuckerberg family's voice commands to perform actions like switching off lights, informing them of the day's schedule, and even entertaining baby Max with Mandarin lessons while her parents wake up. Zuckerberg captured the potential of AI in a Facebook note on the project: "AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets…" Zuckerberg asked the Internet who should voice his home AI, in a Facebook post, of course.

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Will technology at last help us to feel richer in 2017? The prevailing concern for several years now has been that despite rising GDP most people are not feeling any richer, and some people attribute the success of populist politicians to this sense of resentment. But we will hear a lot more about the clutch of technologies that potentially can transform our living standards, and accordingly give a practical response to populism by showing that things can and will get better. The core set of these technologies goes under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence. The New York Times Magazine has just run a piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, under the title "The Great A.I. Awakening", which sums up what is happening.

Most AI computing happens in data centers packed with hundreds or thousands of servers. Get ready for AI to show up where you'd least expect it. In 2016, tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft launched dozens of products and services powered by artificial intelligence. Next year will be all about the rest of the business world embracing AI. Artificial intelligence is a 60-year-old term, and its promise has long seemed like it was forever over the horizon.

The piano ditty below, which ascends jauntily, then finishes with a tuneful flourish, sounds a bit like a jingle composed for the latest toothpaste campaign. The tune was, in fact, dreamed up by a musical AI program developed at Google. And the program's latest compositions show how combining a powerful machine-learning approach with simple musical rules can produce creative works that sound remarkably human. Music composition is an enigmatic form of human creativity. Songwriting programs already exist, but they typically follow a specific set of rules, and they tend to produce tunes that feel rigid and mechanical.

A visitor uses his mobile phone as he walks past the Microsoft booth with a logo for cloud computing software application at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover, March, 6, 2012. A women holds her laptop as she walks in front of a cloud computing logo at the booth of IBM during preparations for the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover, March 9, 2014. NEW YORK President elect Donald Trump is pro-business and anti-red tape. But what if your business is red tape? Companies whose technology helps banks and investors cope with the welter of post financial crisis regulations and avoid increasingly hefty fines - a sector known as "regtech" - are sanguine about Trump's pledge to dismantle some of those reforms.

Almost a year ago, we published our now-annual landscape of machine intelligence companies, and goodness have we seen a lot of activity since then. This year's landscape has a third more companies than our first one did two years ago, and it feels even more futile to try to be comprehensive, since this just scratches the surface of all of the activity out there. As has been the case for the last couple of years, our fund still obsesses over "problem first" machine intelligence--we've invested in 35 machine intelligence companies solving 35 meaningful problems in areas from security to recruiting to software development. At the same time, the hype around machine intelligence methods continues to grow: the words "deep learning" now equally represent a series of meaningful breakthroughs (wonderful) but also a hyped phrase like "big data" (not so good!). We care about whether a founder uses the right method to solve a problem, not the fanciest one.

It's been a year of change in the enterprise software market. SaaS providers are fighting to compete with one another, machine learning is becoming a reality for businesses at a larger scale, and containers are growing in popularity. Here are some of the top trends from 2016 that we'll likely still be talking about next year. As more and more companies adopt software-as-a-service products like Office 365, Slack, and Box, there is increasing pressure to collaborate for companies that compete with each another. After all, nobody wants to be stuck using a service that doesn't work with the other critical systems they have.