When you hear the words "cyborg," or "augmented human," you inescapably picture Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator, the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or perhaps The Six Million Dollar Man, if you're a little older. In Hollywood, any futuristic pairing of man and machine had better be so superawesome, or so superscary, that you'd be willing to spend a good couple of hours (and dollars) being entertained by it. The crazy thing is, even though these images come from a time when technology was barely able to fake the on-screen action, we are now on the cusp of the real thing. We're entering an age that will enhance who we are as humans in ways that go well beyond these cultural clichés. Here's where the art and science of human augmentation is today, and a tantalizing peek at where it's going in the not-too-distant future. Our time as pure, natural humans has an expiration date. It had an expiration date, and it was about 2 million years ago. It was around that time that we first put technology to use to enhance what we could accomplish with just our bodies. It took the form of a crude cutting tool, and though it might not have been much to look at, it beat the hell out of having to use our teeth for everything. "It's going overboard but we don't know how to do it another way at the moment." This, according to Super You: How Technology is Revolutionizing What it Means to Be Human author Andy Walker, was the moment the human race became cyborgs. "Any technology that enhances your natural biology and gives you an advantage over somebody else to either survive or procreate is'cyborgism,'" Walker says. His definition likely flies in the face of your lovingly preserved image of Steve Austin leaping over walls in slow motion. Walker isn't the only one who takes such a liberal view of our cyborgian nature.

When artificial intelligence is as smart as humans, the world will change forever. While technological change itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, AI's effects on society will be so powerful that they've been described in both utopian and apocalyptic terms. And some futurists think those changes are just on the horizon. That includes Ray Kurzweil -- author of five books on AI, including the recent best seller "How to Create a Mind," and founder of the futurist organization the Singularity University. He is currently working with Google to build more machine intelligence into their products.

Fintech reloaded maps out a strategy showing how traditional banks should become a digital platform.

Nonmedical use of prescription medications/drugs (NMUPD) is a serious public health threat, particularly in relation to the prescription opioid analgesics abuse epidemic. While attention to this problem has been growing, there remains an urgent need to develop novel strategies in the field of "digital epidemiology" to better identify, analyze and understand trends in NMUPD behavior. We conducted surveillance of the popular microblogging site Twitter by collecting 11 million tweets filtered for three commonly abused prescription opioid analgesic drugs Percocet (acetaminophen/oxycodone), OxyContin (oxycodone), and Oxycodone. Unsupervised machine learning was applied on the subset of tweets for each analgesic drug to discover underlying latent themes regarding risk behavior. A two-step process of obtaining themes, and filtering out unwanted tweets was carried out in three subsequent rounds of machine learning.

From personalised recommendations to fraud protection, the data-crunching powers of artificial intelligence are changing the face of financial services, writes Alexey Utkin. The past few years have seen a number of exciting advances in artificial intelligence (AI) which could change the way customers interact with financial services. Examples are the evolution of predictive analytics, recommender systems, anomaly detection, decision trees, computer vision and voice recognition. These have enabled delivery of an industrial-scale personalisation and automation of various processes in the financial services industry. The majority of financial services are still aimed at specific financial products, meaning it falls to customers to analyse their own situation and then research which products they should be using.

The Greeks shared their beliefs with the Egyptians on how to interpret good and bad dreams, and the idea of incubating dreams. In that century, other cultures influenced Greeks to develop the belief that souls left the sleeping body.

A dream is successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occurs involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.[2] Dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep--when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. REM sleep is revealed by continuous movements of the eyes during sleep. At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable.[3] The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes.[3] People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, and some may have up to seven;[4] however, most dreams are immediately or quickly forgotten.[5] Dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM.[6] In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is self-aware.[7]

A man has used thought alone to control nanorobots inside a living creature for the first time. The technology released a drug inside cockroaches in response to the man's brain activity – a technique that may be useful for treating brain disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD. Getting drugs to where they need to be exactly when you want them is a challenge. Most drugs diffuse through the blood stream over time – and you're stuck with the side effects until the drug wears off. Now, a team at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, and Bar Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, both in Israel, have developed a system that allows precise control over when a drug is active in the body.

Johnson, 25, was the sniper who targeted the officers at the conclusion of a peaceful march July 7 in downtown Dallas, where demonstrators were protesting fatal police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana. Armed with an assault rifle, he took multiple positions as he fired. Hours later, authorities used a bomb-carrying robot to kill him.

Rana El Kaliouby is cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the pioneer in emotion-aware technology--the next frontier of artificial intelligence. Rana invented the company's award-winning emotion recognition technology, built on an emotion AI science platform that uses deep learning and the world's largest emotion data repository of nearly 4 million faces analyzed from 75 countries, amounting to more than 40 billion emotion data points. Prior to founding Affectiva, as a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, Rana spearheaded the application of emotion technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism research. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, CBS, Time magazine, Fortune, and Reddit. A TED speaker, Rana was recognized by Entrepreneur as one of the seven most powerful women to watch In 2014, inducted into the Women in Engineering Hall of Fame, recognized as a 2012 Technology Review top 35 innovators under 35, listed on Ad Age's 40 under 40, and given Smithsonian magazine's 2015 American Ingenuity Award for Technology.