What would be the best way to deliver nutrition to the 7.1 billion odd people on this planet? Science would tell you that it is not the animals. Researchers at the Not Company (NotCo) which is a food-tech startup based at Chile have developed food products that is no longer based on animal ingredients but entirely based on plants. They use machine learning technology to develop tasty, nutritious and affordable plant-based food. However, the food looks and tastes like the classic (animal-based) food.

Life essentials made better and more affordable." These are the types of startups that partner Paul Buchheit said were demoing today at Y Combinator's Winter 2016 Demo Day 2. Yesterday, we covered the first 60 startups from the batch, and picked our 7 favorites. Buchheit went on to say about today's big aspirations, "Those challenges may seem too large or too complex for a startup to solve. But as Kyle and Dan showed us with Cruise, often the hardest problems are the best investments." He was referring the GM's 1 billion acquisition of Cruise, a YC startup that built self-driving car tech. Today, the room was jam packed, with more chairs brought in for rich investors who were forced to sit on the floor yesterday. Buchheit joked about the first YC batch in summer 2005, saying "Back then no one wanted to go to Demo Day." Someone in the crowd yelled, "15 people wanted to go to Demo Day." Now, there are several hundred VCs avidly watching the presentations. Over the past few years, Y Combinator has expanded to accept startups from a much wider range of industries than traditional apps, including biotech, energy, hardware, and international logistics. When we spoke to investors in the past, some worried they might not have the expertise necessary to evaluate these companies. Now, YC President Sam Altman tells me many VCs have "hired other experts" to fill the gaps. He says "it's become fashionable to hire a Chief Science Officer." As a result, Altman believes that when it comes to funding, these alternative startups "seem to be doing just was well if not a little better" than their traditional software batchmates. Spinal Singularity – Better catheter Last year, over 5 million people were catheterized. Spinal Singularity wants to tap into the 2 billion urinary catheter market with a connected catheter that allows you to control the flow of urine by actuating a magnetic valve. The connected catheter is minimally invasive, and can be inserted or extracted in your own home.

Is fear all in the mind? Experiments on twins who can't feel fear are suggesting that some emotions are experienced only after we become aware of changes to our body. Many studies have shown that the amygdalae – two almond-shaped regions near the centre of the brain – are crucial for feeling fear. People who have lost their amygdalae through brain injury or disease also lose the ability to feel fear. In 2013, Justin Feinstein at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and his colleagues managed to scare three "fearless" people – two female identical twins and a woman known as S.M., none of whom have amygdalae – by getting them to inhale carbon dioxide, making them choke.

If you were tweeting and drinking between July 2013 to 2014, your tweets might have been used as part of an experiment by computer science students at the University of Rochester. Nabil Hossain and colleagues trained a computer to identify alcohol-related tweets and used the data to monitor alcohol-related activity in a particular area. The research could help with understanding and responding to public health issues, according to the authors of the study. The researchers collected more than 11,000 geotagged tweets from New York City and Monroe County, where Rochester is located, in the northern part of the state. They filtered all of the tweets that mentioned alcohol-related words such as beer, drunk, hangover, wasted or party (as well as variations such as "druuuuuunk").

Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds. In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises -- including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack -- on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft. Researchers said, "I was raped." Siri responded: "I don't know what you mean by'I was raped.'

At Kik, we've been thinking about the coming bot revolution for a long time. We first launched a basic bot platform a year and a half ago, and millions of users have been chatting with Kik bots ever since. Other messengers, such as Telegram and Slack, have been doing their own work with bots. Now, Facebook is rumored to be announcing its own bot platform for Messenger at f8 on April 12. It's no longer a question of if bots are coming, but how. Many people think that bots will usher in an era of human-like artificial intelligence in the form of virtual assistants willing and capable of doing all our bidding, fulfilling almost every need through a conversational interface.

Most discussions of "robot rights" play out in a seemingly distant, science-fictional future. While skeptics roll their eyes, advocates argue that technology will advance to the point where robots deserve moral consideration because they are "just like us," sometimes referencing the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner depicts a world where androids have human-like emotions and develop human-like relationships to the point of being indistinguishable from people. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel on which the film is based, contains a small, significant difference in storyline. In the book, the main character falls in love with an android that only pretends to requite his feelings.

The ability to access and use financial services is critical to managing day-to-day life, weathering unexpected events, and capturing opportunities. Yet, some 46 percent of working-age adults in developing countries remain excluded from the formal financial system. It means they use the age-old informal mechanisms such as the moneylender, the pawnbroker, or the rotating savings club that can be unreliable and very expensive. In developed countries, working families are more likely to be under- or badly served rather than outright excluded. In the US, for example, every year some 25 million households use alternative services such as payday lenders or check cashers.

More than 1 million Syrians have fled to Lebanon since the start of the conflict and as many as one-fifth of them may be suffering from mental health disorders, according to the World Health Organisation. But Lebanon's mental health services are mostly private and the needs of refugees – who may have lost loved ones, their home, livelihood and community – are mostly going unmet. Hoping to support the efforts of overworked psychologists in the region, the Silicon Valley startup X2AI has created an artificially intelligent chatbot called Karim that can have personalised text message conversations in Arabic to help people with their emotional problems. As the user interacts with Karim, the system uses natural language processing to analyse the person's emotional state and returns appropriate comments, questions and recommendations. Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?

Last week, we witnessed DeepMind AlphaGo's stunning victories over Go legend and world champion Lee Se-dol. This landmark event has stoked excitement over AI's potential in every aspect of life more than any other in recent memory. DeepMind (an AI system of neural networks) was acquired by Google in 2014 and uses games as a testing ground for AI algorithms that could have real-world applications. 'I think what we've done with AlphaGo is to introduce with the neural networks this aspect of intuition, if you want to call it that, and that's really the thing that separates out top Go players: their intuition.' The same could be said about top lawyers, lawyering and legal service provision.