Humans have broken the Internet. Cyberbullying, harassment, social shaming, and sheer unpleasantness plague such sites as Twitter and Reddit, especially if you happen to attract the wrong sort of attention. Consider the way Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones and public relations executive Justine Sacco became targets for mass abuse. The companies that run online services are typically squeezed between charges of indifference to harassment and suppression of free speech. But now Google thinks it can use artificial intelligence to lessen this tragedy of the digital commons.

Well, here's something you might want to prepare yourself for. By the time wedding bells are ringing your new son- or daughter-in-law could very well be a robot. That's what Dr. David Levy believes, at least. You might recognize Levy's name, either because of his chess-playing prowess or his decades-long involvement with artificial intelligence research. Levy, who happens to be a very good friend of computing pioneer Clive Sinclair, says that humans and robots will be tying the knot "before, not after, the year 2050."

We are all witnesses that 2016 was the year when Digital Health technologies took off and developed actively. Such rapid growth was partly due to the emergence of numerous wearable tech devices, but also due to numerous breakthroughs in other IT-related business areas. Digital health improves the quality of life, increases the lifespan, and gives people an opportunity to learn more about their lifestyles and how their bodies work. Most importantly, digital health (or, more specifically, digital healthcare) changes and improves the quality of care for patients, by enhancing the instruments for surgeons and other medical staff. Let's find out what are the main trends in health information technologies (HIT) and how will they affect the development of the sphere as a whole.

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.

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.

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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.