English novelist Emily Brontë may have suffered from a form of autism formerly known as Asperger syndrome, according to her biographer. During an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday in the U.K., Claire Harman -- author of recent biography "Charlotte Brontë: A Life" -- discussed many of Brontë's traits, some of which she said resembled symptoms related to Asperger's, the Guardian reported. Brontë's personality characteristics and behaviors -- like her genius, her dislike of leaving home, social discomfort and sudden bursts of anger and frustrations -- could have brought about a prognosis of the disorder if she was alive in more modern-day times, Harman added. Harman recounted one of the "Wuthering Heights" author's temperamental instances that was documented by biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote in an 1857 biography on Charlotte Brontë about a time her younger sister left the family dog "half blind and stupefied" after punching the dog in the face for dirtying the laundry. Harman said the incident was "just a sign of Emily's strength and character."

A Markov chain is a random process with the property that the next state depends only on the current state. For example: If you have the choice of red or blue twice the process would be Markovian if each time you chose the decision had nothing to do with your choice previously (see diagram below). How can Markov Chains help us? To start with we need to define some basic terminology. The changes of state within the system are called transitions, and the probabilities associated with various state-changes are called transition probabilities.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. Pharmaceutical company Mylan is still in the news after hiking the price of life-saving EpiPens by more than 400%. But keep this in mind: Of roughly 250 million raised for and against 17 ballot measures coming before California voters in November, more than a quarter of that amount -- about 70 million -- has been contributed by deep-pocketed drug companies to defeat the Drug Price Relief Act, which would limit drug prices charged to state healthcare programs. Spending on the measure could set a state record over coming weeks. No buzz kill: New federal rules for small commercial drones go into effect Monday.

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had found the perfect father for their baby. Seven years after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a narcissistic personality disorder and a criminal history. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation. The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donor's name, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple.

Ariel lost 20 lbs of weight and documented his progress using a series of scripts. The VW project is co-sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo Research. Ariel had logged his data as a simple CSV file using only weight, sleep, exercise and foods consumed as data points. He then wrote a perl script to convert his CSV over to the vowpal-wabbit traning-set. He learned which foods, exercise and sleep patterns showed a positive correlation with weight loss.

For the past year, Amazon has been cracking down on sellers and third parties offering money for positive reviews. But for one team of data scientists, negative reviews on Amazon are much more interesting than positive ones. Researchers from the University of Washington's Data Science for Social Good program have set out to harness Amazon reviews to predict food product recalls. The team has developed a machine learning platform that can mine the text of Amazon reviews to make predictions about the safety of products. While the program is still in progress, it has the potential to revolutionize the process of food recalls.

Artificial intelligence is improving rapidly, and a lot of people are worried that it will lead to massive job losses. In the past, technology mostly displaced workers doing routine tasks or manual labor. But as software becomes more sophisticated, there's a growing prospect that truck drivers, teachers, and perhaps even doctors could see their jobs replaced by a robot or a computer program. Ryan Avent is an economics correspondent for the Economist who has been thinking about the economics of automation for several years. He's a technology optimist -- he thinks software and robots really will massively boost economic productivity. But in a new book, he argues that this won't necessarily be good news for ordinary workers, since a glut of underemployed workers will make it harder to bargain for higher pay.

A Cambridge entrepreneur who sold his company to Amazon is increasing the amount of angel investing he's doing now he no longer works for the e-commerce giant. William Tunstall-Pedoe sold Evi Technologies, his voice recognition startup to Amazon in 2012, for an undisclosed amount that TechCrunch reported to be around 26 million ( 20 million). Following the acquisition, Tunstall-Pedoe became part of the Amazon family. However, his investment activities have been somewhat limited over the last four years. "I did a bit of investment while I was in Amazon but obviously that was constrained by Amazon legal; I had to get permission if it overlapped at all with anything Amazon did and most things overlap with something that Amazon is doing," Tunstall-Pedoe told Business Insider at his home in Cambridge.

Amy Kennedy, Education Director of the Kennedy Forum, and wife of Patrick J. Kennedy, honoree, advocate and former U.S. Representative from Rhode Island, speaks on stage at 2016 Many Faces Of Mental Health Gala at The Pierre Hotel on April 12, 2016 in New York City. In recent months, the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of precision medicine has continuously progressed. In fact, its influence has not only concentrated in transforming healthcare systems but also revolutionizing the approaches when it comes to diagnosing diseases such as cancer, autism and now, mental health disorders. Artificial intelligence has indeed proven its potential and significance in various field of sciences. With the integration of AI into the medical field, a promising future awaits the full utilization of data-driven medicine, which was dubbed as healthcare transformation's "next frontier," Parent Herald previously noted. After proving that artificial intelligence can be useful in the diagnosis of cancer, eye diseases, autism and even in cosmetic medicine, experts found that AI's machine learning approach can potentially assist them in diagnosing mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorders.

While that sounds insanely convoluted, the aim is to actually help humans. If a schizophrenia patient is about to have a violent episode, for instance, an EEG could trigger the release of powerful drugs. That way, they'd only get them when needed, minimizing harmful side effects. The nanobots injected into the roaches are made from so-called DNA origami that's natural and easy to program. They're also fitted with iron oxide nanoparticle "locks" that open and release drugs when exposed to an EEG-controlled electromagnet.