In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a corner of South Carolina sits a town that should be economically dead. For decades, Greenville was the heart of the state's textile industry--and its economic engine. First attracted by the area's fast-moving rivers as a way to power looms, textile manufacturers employed tens of thousands of people here. Beginning in the 1970s, however, facing competition from lower-cost manufacturing regions like Mexico and Southeast Asia, these companies began to struggle. Over the next decades, many factories closed.

Like many in Silicon Valley, technology entrepreneur Bryan Johnson sees a future in which intelligent machines can do things like drive cars on their own and anticipate our needs before we ask. What's uncommon is how Johnson wants to respond: find a way to supercharge the human brain so that we can keep up with the machines. From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, his science-fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer's or concussions. Top neuroscientists who are building the chip -- they call it a neuroprosthetic -- hope that in the longer term, it will be able to boost intelligence, memory and other cognitive tasks. The medical device is years in the making, Johnson acknowledges, but he can afford the time.

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings.[1] It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but is more easily reversed than the state of hibernation or of being comatose. Mammalian sleep occurs in repeating periods, in which the body alternates between two highly distinct modes known as non-REM and REM sleep. REM stands for "rapid eye movement" but involves many other aspects including virtual paralysis of the body. During sleep, most systems in an animal are in an anabolic state, building up the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. Sleep in non-human animals is observed in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and some fish, and, in some form, in insects and even in simpler animals such as nematodes. The internal circadian clock promotes sleep daily at night in diurnal organisms (such as humans) and in the day in nocturnal organisms (such as rodents). However, sleep patterns vary among individual humans and even more widely among other species. In the last century, artificial light has in many areas of the world substantially altered sleep timing among both humans and many other species.[2] The diverse purposes and mechanisms of sleep are the subject of substantial ongoing research.[3] Sleep seems to assist animals with improvements in the body and mind. A well-known feature of sleep in humans is the dream, an experience typically recounted in narrative form, which resembles waking life while in progress, but which usually can later be distinguished as fantasy. Sleep is sometimes confused with unconsciousness, but is quite different in terms of thought process. Humans may suffer from a number of sleep disorders. These include dyssomnias (such as insomnia, hypersomnia, and sleep apnea), parasomnias (such as sleepwalking and REM behavior disorder), bruxism, and the circadian rhythm sleep disorders. In mammals and birds, sleep is divided into two broad types: rapid eye movement (REM sleep) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM or non-REM sleep). Each type has a distinct set of physiological and neurological features associated with it. REM sleep is associated with dreaming, desynchronized and faster brain waves, loss of muscle tone,[4] and suspension of homeostasis[citation needed]. REM and non-REM sleep are so different that physiologists classify them as distinct behavioral states. In this view, REM, non-REM, and waking represent the three major modes of consciousness, neural activity, and physiological regulation.[5] According to the Hobson & McCarley activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed in 1975–1977, the alternation between REM and non-REM can be explained in terms of cycling, reciprocally influential neurotransmitter systems.[6]

If you could implant a device in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you do it? A new company has just invested 100 million into developing such a device, and is being advised by some of the biggest names in science. The company, Kernel, was launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He says he has spent many years wondering how best to contribute to humanity. I think it's the most precious and powerful resource in existence," says Johnson. His goal is for human intelligence to expand and develop in the same way that artificial intelligence has in recent years. The first experiments planned will be on memory. Johnson is working with Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who is looking at the hippocampus – a brain region key for memory. Berger is currently studying people with epilepsy, who already have electrical implants in their brains to treat their seizures. Rather than using these implants to stimulate the brain, Berger's team have been using them to record brain activity instead, to tell us more about how our memory works. Once we learn how a healthy brain functions, we should eventually be able to mimic it, says Johnson. By electrically stimulating the same pattern of activity, the team think they should be able to restore memory in people with memory disorders. Berger has already had some success with animals, and has started experiments in people. Kernel will be starting new human studies in the coming months, says Johnson. "The idea is that if you have loss of memory function, then you could build a prosthetic for the hippocampus that would help restore the circuitry, and restore memory," says Johnson. People with memory disorders, for example due to a traumatic experience or ageing, are intended to be the first people to test such a prosthesis. "The first super-humans are those who have deficits to start with," says Johnson. But Johnson then plans to develop this prosthesis to enhance memory, and potentially other functions, in healthy people. He envisions a future in which it is normal for people to walk around with chips in their brains, providing them with a cognitive boost as they go about their everyday business. The 100 million – from Johnson's own pocket – will be spent on developing such a device. Ideally, it will be as tiny and easy to implant as possible, while being able to record or stimulate multiple neurons. The team are also working on ways to develop personalised algorithms – a set of rules that dictate normal brain function for an individual. Johnson hopes that memory enhancement will just be the start. "If we can mimic the natural function of the brain, and we can truly work with neural code, then I posit the question – what can't we do?" says Johnson. "Could we learn a thousand times faster?

Investigators eager to uncover the genetic basis of autism could now have hundreds of promising new leads thanks to a study by Princeton University and Simons Foundation researchers. In the first effort of its kind, the research team developed a machine-learning program that scoured the whole human genome to predict which genes may contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results of the program's analyses -- a rogue's gallery of 2,500 candidate genes -- vastly expand on the 65 autism-risk genes currently known. Researchers have recently estimated that 400 to 1,000 genes underpin the complex neurodevelopmental disorder. This newest research provides a manageable, "highly enriched" pool from which to pin down the full suite of ASD-related genes, the researchers said.

Andre van Rüschen slowly climbed a five-step ramp at the end of his race. With a black processor strapped to his back and leg supports on either side of his lower limbs, he stayed focused on the body-machine coordination that was keeping him upright. He had walked over a wooden slope, criss-crossed bright yellow bars and tried to step on gray discs that were placed irregularly on the floor. Now, standing atop the last obstacle in the exoskeleton race, he took a moment to pause and look up at his opponent on the adjacent track. They were both on the ramp, going head-to-head at the world's first Cybathlon, a sporting competition designed for people with severe disabilities.

While most of the news coming from LeEco's event in San Francisco was about new TVs and phones, the company's CEO, YT Jia made a point to show off his company's desire to become not just a consumer electronics brand but also an automaker. The LeSee was in an accident on its way from LA and the LeSee Pro was delayed on its way back from London where it was being used by Michael Bay (Yeah, that Michael Bay) as part of the new Transformers movie. The car has no set price and no one knows when it will launch. But Jia noted onstage though that he has a very personal reason for building the car. He wants to clear up the smog problem in China and has a "strong desire to bring back our blue skies." The car eventually made it to the event location but not in time to make it onstage.

They're practically everywhere, and it's no wonder: according to some analysts, the fitness tracker market is one poised to reach 19 billion in 2018. But some companies are positioned better than others. On Wednesday, one of the arguable forerunners, Moov, took the wraps off the Moov HR, an activity tracker that measures heart rate with pinpoint accuracy. The Moov HR builds on the foundation of the startup's previous sensor, the Moov Now, which garnered praise for its innovative approach to fitness. Rather than simply measuring the number of steps you've taken, the calories you've burned, and distance you've walked, it fed that data into an artificial intelligence that dynamically guided you through goal-oriented workouts.

It's another step in the march toward advice that erodes investors' needs for human help: A robo adviser focused on serving the high-net-worth client, powered by artificial intelligence and designed to automate their specific tax management concerns. Meeting the complicated needs of the wealthy requires a deep knowledge of tax rules and regulations says Hedgeable CEO Mike Kane. "Technology and AI systems can interpret and learn from these rules better than humans can, without our emotional biases." Doubling down on its embrace of Asian themes, Hedgeable's newest offering in its robo platform is a feature called'Tax Samurai,' run by an AI bot called'Katana.' For 30 basis points, it will work for client accounts with a minimum of 1 million to analyze their securities, aggregate all of their financial data, create tax efficient transfers, apply automated downside protection on any current holdings, and perform tax efficient trading and tax-loss harvesting.

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research branch have created a speech recognition system that can pick up the words in a conversation as well as most humans can. The new system was announced by Microsoft in a blog post and the team's findings were published on Monday. The record-breaking tech has hit what the team is calling "human parity" -- that is, it's not perfect, but it makes the same or fewer mistakes in transcription than human professionals. The word error rate of the system was down to 5.9 percent, from the 6.3 percent error rate reported just last month. That's more impressive than it sounds, as humans will commonly mishear words like "have" for "is", or "a" for "the" in transcribing.