Argentinian goalkeeper Sergio Goycochea used to urinate on the pitch, certain French rugby players like to headbutt each other and Serena Williams apparently never changes her socks during a tournament--but as athletic rituals go, listening to music composed by a robot has got to be up there. In an effort to get one up on their rivals, the U.S. Olympic wrestling team has been listening to songs written by artificial intelligence to prepare for matches. The music, created by Brain.fm, Speaking to Newsweek, team coach Matt Lindland says he came across Brain.fm after actively seeking a sleep-based solution for his athletes. Lindland approached science journalist Steven Kotler, who recommended the AI-composed music as a safe and healthy performance-enhancing technique.

We've talked before about the prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will likely disrupt things like we've never seen before with some estimates predicting that up to 80% of all service jobs will be impacted. Healthcare is one area where AI is receiving a good chunk of funding. We looked before at one example of an artificial intelligence company called Enlitic that uses machine learning technology to read X-rays better than your average radiologist who makes 286,000 a year on average. There are actually quite a few artificial intelligence companies in healthcare and CB Insights recently identified 65 of them at various stages of funding. Founded just last year, Chinese company iCarbonX has taken in nearly 200 million in funding from investors that include the 200 billion Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your laser-focused Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Near Earth Autonomy, a Pittsburgh-based robotics and aerospace company (and CMU spin-off), has discovered the secret to flying a drone autonomously around obstacles without GPS: use a massive hexcopter that can haul around a Velodyne lidar. R1 is a new "personal humanoid" platform from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

It's being dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the explosion of robots, machines, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace is coming. There's been a lot of recent speculation about how robotics and automation will change the landscape of employment, and the professions that could become obsolete as a result. We're all familiar with those annoying "unexpected item in the bagging area" self-service supermarket checkouts, or the big robots used on the production line in factories making cars and other complex products. In the supermarket, now just one checkout assistant can manage 6 or more tills, or cars and machines can be assembled safely, with every one being turned out to the same standard. So what jobs will be next on the chopping block in this technological revolution? By and large, the main professions under threat are ones that involve repetitive tasks – that could be inputting data, preparing spreadsheets and reports and other administrative duties, retail jobs, manufacturing and even some more complex analytical roles that could be better served by an algorithm doing all the hard work.

Disease risk estimates can be used as prognostic information and support for treating CVDs. The commonly used Framingham risk score (FRS) for CVD prediction is outdated for the modern population, so FRS may not be accurate enough. In this paper, a novel CVD prediction system based on machine learning is proposed. Methods: This study has been conducted with the data of 689 patients showing symptoms of CVD. Furthermore, the dataset of 5,209 CVD patients of the famous Framingham study has been used for validation purposes.

As a Stanford student, Zeshan Hussain found many ways to take part in public service projects near and far – on campus, at a high school on the other side of San Francisco Bay and at a tropical disease hospital in India. In January 2016, along with other members of the Muslim Student Union (MSU) and other student groups, Hussain helped organize Syrian Refugee Awareness Week, which included a teach-in about the crisis, a benefit dinner to raise funds for the charity United Muslim Relief and a clothing collection drive in student residence halls. The organization brought in Sana Khatib, a Syrian-American activist whose father is a former political prisoner and whose family fled Syria and the Assad regime when she was young. Through a clothing drive the MSU also collected 500 pounds of clothing just on campus from students and faculty, an accomplishment Hussain described as "very heartening." "We wanted to raise awareness about the crisis and its history, and about the personal struggles of students who may be refugees, or students who have families that are refugees," he said.

For those suffering depression, PTSD, or other mental health challenges, a breakdown can be a slow burn, developing over days or weeks in between doctor visits. Delay in treatment can have lasting consequences. "Very likely, every single episode of depression or mania is going to damage your brain a little more," says Thilo Deckersbach, a Harvard psychology professor who practices at Massachusetts General Hospital. The hospital's online MoodNetwork recruits patients with major depression and bipolar disorder for clinical studies, including a new one with the Boston-based artificial intelligence company Cogito. They are testing the ability of a mobile app called "Companion" to flag early signs of trouble by monitoring activities like patients' movement, calling and texting behavior, and the way they speak.

You might think that every choice a writer makes is highly deliberate, part of a grand master plan that only she is entirely aware of. We certainly felt that way while reading Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie's award-winning sci-fi novel about a spaceship AI that gets trapped in a single body and seeks revenge on her enemies. There are so many details embedded in the world-building--from a fixation on gloves and tea to the use of "she" for all genders--that Leckie surely had reams of unpublished backstory (or at least a yarn chart) to explain and keep track of it all. But as we found out in our WIRED Book Club conversation with the author, Leckie takes a far less structured approach when it comes to creating new universes. Was this series always a trilogy in your mind? Though I'm not sure why, to be honest.

Every field of scientific study has its own holy grail. For particle physicists, it's the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model; for astrophysicists, it is the hunt for the elusive dark matter and dark energy; and for neuroscientists, it is explaining how inanimate matter becomes conscious. Obviously, the first step in understanding the mysteries of consciousness would be to map the tool through which it manifests itself -- the brain. On Wednesday, a team of neuroscientists released an extremely detailed map of terra incognita of the human brain -- the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is the brain's outermost layer and is responsible for sensory perception, language, attention, tool use and abstract thinking.

WASHINGTON – Neuroscientists acting as cartographers of the human mind have devised the most comprehensive map ever made of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions such as abstract thought, language and memory. Using MRI images from the brains of 210 people, the researchers said on Wednesday they were able to pinpoint 180 distinct areas in the cerebral cortex, the brain's thin, wrinkly outermost layer made of so-called gray matter. These areas were present in both the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. More than half, 97 of them, were previously unknown. The researchers nailed down the specific function of some of the areas, but said they were only scratching the surface on understanding what all of the areas did.