We've all been there - a new symbol pops up on your car's dashboard that you don't recognise, causing panic to set in. But the days of frantically rooting around for your car's handbook could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to Apple's next iPhone update. The tech giant is updating its Visual Look Up tool in the upcoming iOS 17 update. While the tool can already recognise popular landmarks, statues, art, plants, pets and more in photos, Apple has confirmed that it will soon also recognise symbols. 'Now users can identify food, storefronts, signs, and symbols, and lift individual subjects from photos and videos,' it explained.

To do this, Lipson and colleagues have designed a machine learning algorithm capable of studying physical phenomena by "watching" videos, such as the swing of a double pendulum or the flicker of a flame, and producing the number of variables needed to explain the action. For known systems, the algorithm was able to predict the correct number of variables within 1 value (e.g. The findings were published last week in a study titled "Automated discovery of fundamental variables hidden in experimental data" in the journal Nature Computational Science.

For Christmas this year, we got an Echo. OK, technically it was a gift for my husband, but he knows it's really for the whole family. Once we freed it from the box, we excitedly gathered around to test our new robot friend. I started with a little small talk: "Hi Alexa. My 5-year-old jumped in to try a skill he must have seen in a commercial: "Alexa, play'It's Raining Tacos.' " Soon, we were all dancing to the silly techno song. Finally, my husband took a turn, "Alexa, cómo estás?" Then he decided to try something simpler, "Alexa, hola." But even the simplest and most known Spanish word was beyond Alexa in English mode. We were surprised and sad to learn that Alexa may not work for our bilingual home. Alexa has a Spanish mode. But that's not what we need. My husband's first language is Spanish--specifically Argentine Spanish--and he speaks English fluently. My first language is English and my Spanish is OK. He and I communicate in Spanglish and are trying to raise our children to be bilingual. When texting on our iPhones, we used to switch the language setting back and forth, but were thrilled when we discovered that the adaptable iOS had quickly learned to accommodate our Spanglish. I naively thought Alexa would learn, too. But here we are a few weeks later, and it responds to any Spanish instructions with a sad "whoomp" sound or with, "I'm sorry.