A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. BMW and the maker of Mercedes-Benz have reached a deal to collaborate on the development of self-driving car technology. The partnership between BMW and Daimler is a tectonic shift for the rival German luxury automakers, reflecting their need to collaborate on extremely expensive and challenging autonomous vehicle systems. The companies had already formed a joint venture to collaborate on "mobility services," such as car sharing and ride-hailing services. Taken together, these moves suggest that you could one day share a ride in a car jointly produced by two companies whose history of fierce competition is akin to the rivalry between American automakers Ford and General Motors.

BARCELONA, SPAIN - Next-generation wireless technology is taking the medical world a crucial step closer to robots performing remotely controlled surgery, a doctor in Spain said Wednesday after carrying out the world's first 5G-powered telementored operation. Doctors have telementored surgeries in the past using wireless networks, but blazing fast 5G increases image quality and definition, which are crucial for medical teams to take decisions with as much information, and as few mistakes, as possible. "This is a first step to achieve our dream, which is to make remote operations in the near future," said Dr. Antonio de Lacy after providing real-time guidance via a 5G video link from a Barcelona congress center to a surgical team that operated on a patient with an intestinal tumor about 5 kilometers away at the Hospital Clinic. Experts predict 5G will allow surgeons to control a robot arm to carry out operations in remote locations that lack specialist doctors. De Lacy, the head of the hospital's gastrointestinal surgery service, used his finger to draw on a screen an area of the intestine where nerves are located and instructed the team how to navigate the surgery.

If you shop at Westfield, you've probably been scanned and recorded by dozens of hidden cameras built into the centres' digital advertising billboards. The semi-camouflaged cameras can determine not only your age and gender but your mood, cueing up tailored advertisements within seconds, thanks to facial detection technology. Westfield's Smartscreen network was developed by the French software firm Quividi back in 2015. Their discreet cameras capture blurry images of shoppers and apply statistical analysis to identify audience demographics. And once the billboards have your attention they hit record, sharing your reaction with advertisers.

In the 11 months since 17 teachers and students were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, campuses across the country have started spending big on surveillance technology. The Lockport, New York, school district spent $1.4 million in state funds on a facial-recognition system. Schools in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles have adopted artificial-intelligence software--prone to false positives--that scans students' Facebook and Twitter accounts for signs that they might become a shooter. In New Mexico, students as young as 6 are under acoustic surveillance, thanks to a gunshot-detection program originally developed for use by the military to track enemy snipers. Earlier this month, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released its report on the safety and security failures that contributed to fatalities during last year's shooting.

Over an 11-month period--May 2016 to April 2017--51% of all noise complaints in the focus area were related to after-hours construction activity (6 P.M.–7 A.M.), three times the amount in the next category. Note combining all construction-related complaints adds up to 70% of this sample, highlighting how disruptive to the lives of ordinary citizens this particular category of noise can be. Figure 4c includes SPL values (blue line) at a five-minute resolution for the after-hours period during or immediately preceding a subset of the complaints. Dotted green lines correspond to background levels, computed as the moving average of SPL measurements within a two-hour window. Dotted black lines correspond to SPL values 10dB above the background, the threshold defined by the city's noise code to indicate potential violations.

This is a visualization of global internet attacks, seen during the 4th China Internet Security Conference in Beijing. Microsoft's Bing search engine is no longer accessible in China, the company reports. This is a visualization of global internet attacks, seen during the 4th China Internet Security Conference in Beijing. Microsoft's Bing search engine is no longer accessible in China, the company reports. The Microsoft search engine, Bing, appears to have been blocked in China since Wednesday.

Eat too much and there won't be grass for anyone. In an essay written in 1833, the British economist William Forster Lloyd made a profound observation using the example of cattle grazing. Lloyd described a hypothetical scenario involving herders who share a pasture, and individually decide how many of their animals would graze there. If few herders exercised restraint, overgrazing would occur, reducing the pasture's future usefulness and eventually hurting everybody. The sinister beauty of this example is that the rational course of action is to behave selfishly.

Over the past week, the #2009vs2019 meme challenge, alternately known as the #10yearchallenge and #HowHardDidAgeHitYou, has become the latest social media trend ripe for think piece fodder. While the challenge inspired a host of discussions about social media narcissism and gendered norms, author and consultant Kate O'Neill put her own spin on the meme in a tweet raising the privacy implications of posting age-separated photos of oneself on Facebook. The post generated enough buzz and discussion on Twitter that O'Neill expanded it into an article in Wired, in which she argued that Facebook or another data-hungry entity could exploit the meme to train facial recognition algorithms to better handle age-related characteristics and age progression predictions. She noted that the clear labeling of the year in which the pictures were taken, along with the volume of pictures explicitly age-separated by a set amount of time, could be quite valuable to a company like Facebook. "In other words, thanks to this meme, there's now a very large data set of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now," O'Neill wrote.

What jobs will AI probably not destroy? The jobs that are most susceptible to automation in the near term are those that are fundamentally routine or predictable in nature. If you have a boring job--where you come to work and do the same kinds of things again and again, you should probably worry. The tasks within jobs like this are likely to be encapsulated in the data that is collected by organizations. So it may only be a matter of time before a powerful machine learning algorithm comes along that can automate much of this work.

The day after Christmas is always a good day to see which products and apps people were most excited about this holiday season. According to Wednesday's top free apps charts on Android's Google Play and iOS' iPhone, plenty of people received Google Home, Alexa-enabled speakers and Fitbits this holiday season. Amazon's Alexa app took the top spot on both app stores' lists of the top free apps midday Wednesday while Fitbit was in the No. 5 slot. Google Home took the No. 3 spot on the Android Play Store and came in seventh on iPhone. Since all three apps are needed to set up their respective devices, it's likely that many people received Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers, Chromecast streaming sticks and Fitbit trackers.