Listening to an audiobook before bed affects a person's brain activity after they nod off and the content of their dreams. Better understanding this could lead to therapies that help to treat certain mental health conditions by targeting memory processing during sleep. While a person sleeps, their brain spontaneously "replays", or reactivates, patterns of electrical activity that are related to learning, to transfer important new information to long-term memory storage.

Get ready, San Francisco: The state government on Thursday approved a major expansion of driverless robotaxi service throughout the city. And get ready, Los Angeles: The industry is planning to push for driverless rides here as soon as it gets permits to do so. The state's green light, on a 3-1 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission, signals a historic turning point for the robotaxi business as it evolves from fascinating experiment to commercial reality. It also marks the beginning of a grand experiment in public safety as thousands of multi-ton vehicles operated via artificial intelligence attempt to safely negotiate the hills and narrow streets of San Francisco. It highlights California's messy multiagency regulation of new automobile technology: Two agencies are in charge of the robotaxi business, the CPUC and the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Authors seem to be facing a new threat from artificial intelligence, with one finding books she didn't write being sold by Amazon under her name. There are fears that ready access to generative AI tools could make it easy for people to impersonate writers without their permission. The issue was raised by author Jane Friedman.

Milekic's morning could be an advertisement for the potential of AI to transform health care. Mount Sinai is among a group of elite hospitals pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into AI software and education, turning their institutions into laboratories for this technology. They're buoyed by a growing body of scientific literature, such as a recent study finding AI readings of mammograms detected 20 percent more cases of breast cancer than radiologists -- along with the conviction that AI is the future of medicine.

At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren't making sweet treats; they're cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies. In nature, antibodies are the body's response to disease and serve as the immune system's front-line troops. They're strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected. But designing these antibodies is a slow process for humans--protein designers must wade through the millions of potential combinations of amino acids to find the ones that will fold together in exactly the right way, and then test them all experimentally, tweaking some variables to improve some characteristics of the treatment while hoping that doesn't make it worse in other ways.

More than 70 countries are due to hold regional or national elections by the end of 2024. It will be a period of huge political significance across the globe, with more than 2 billion people (mostly from the global south) directly affected by the outcome of these elections. The stakes for the integrity of democracy have never been higher. As concerns mount about the influential role of information pollution, disseminated through the vast platforms of US and Chinese corporations, in shaping these elections, a new shadow looms: how artificial intelligence – more specifically, generative AI such as OpenAI's ChatGPT – has increasingly moved into the mainstream of technology. The recent wave of hype around AI has seen a fair share of doom-mongering.

Russian air defences have shot down two armed drones headed for Moscow, the city's mayor said, the latest in a surge of drone attacks on Russia's capital city. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Wednesday that one drone was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the city, while the second was shot down in the Minsk highway area, west of the capital. "Two combat drones' attempt to fly into the city was recorded. Both were shot down by air defence," Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging channel, without naming an attacker. "At the moment, there is no information about victims of the fall of the wreckage," he said, adding that emergency services were on the ground.

Traditional machine learning models often yield biased results, favouring groups with large populations or being influenced by unknown factors, and take extensive effort to identify from instances containing patterns and sub-patterns coming from different classes or primary sources. The medical field is one area where there are severe implications for biased machine learning results. Hospital staff and medical professionals rely on datasets containing thousands of medical records and complex computer algorithms to make critical decisions about patient care. Machine learning is used to sort the data, which saves time. However, specific patient groups with rare symptomatic patterns may go undetected, and mislabeled patients and anomalies could impact diagnostic outcomes.

People's hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence. For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. "Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh," says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.

People's hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence. For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. "Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh," says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.