Airport security is stressful enough, with travelers scrambling to remove their liquids, laptops, and shoes and then hustling through the checkpoint's body scanner. But add in an unnecessary pat-down, and the whole experience can feel downright invasive. Fortunately for fliers, the number of passenger pat-downs is shrinking, according to the TSA, thanks to new artificial intelligence-based technology the organization has been rolling out for the past several months. The improvement comes in the form of an updated algorithm used on TSA's body scanners that's designed to substantially decrease the amount of false alarms that lead to erroneous pat-downs. The new algorithm was designed to ease the body scanner process for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming travelers, who in the past have often had issues with the machines.

Some passengers traveling through Denver International Airport this holiday season are in for a treat--or what amounts to a treat in today's high-throughput, high-stress security environment. As they go through TSA screening, they'll be able to keep their hands at their sides because of a new type of rapid body scanner. Instead of standing sideways in a plastic tube while a scanner shwoop shwoops around them, Denver fliers will step between two white plastic walls, about 4 feet apart. There are no moving parts, and the scan takes less than a second; if all is clear, the passenger moves on. The Denver scanner is built by Rohde & Schwarz, which also has a system up and running in Cologne Bonn Airport, Germany.

An explosion in available data on consumers, and the ability to process this data for intelligent recommendations, is creating an exciting transformation in financial services. Organizations that can leverage this opportunity will be in a position to provide personalized financial and non-financial recommendations that were impossible just a few years ago. In his bestselling book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Harari writes at length about the onset of a new worldview he believes will revolutionize humankind. He calls this worldview dataism – the belief that super intelligent computer algorithms will become so precise that we will trust them to essentially run our lives. We see early stages of dataism today.

For a previous generation in the US, the only places where one might worry about the possibility of a mass casualty were "high-value targets," like airports and government offices, places that have body scanners and bag inspections, security guards and long lines to get in today. But attackers increasingly strike at public places like nightclubs, stadiums, clinics, malls, places of worship and schools. A startup called Evolv Technology Inc., has raised $18 million to help venues with even a limited budget use advanced technology rather than pat downs to detect and prevent mass casualties. Investors in Evolv's new round of funding included General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Gates Ventures, and Data Collective. The Waltham, Mass.-based startup has created both hardware and software for physical security.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gleaming like a modernist and high-tech Apple Store, health care start-up Forward has designed a doctor's office/pharmacy of the future. Tuesday, Forward opened the doors of what it hopes is the first of many state-of-the-art medical facilities in the USA. The 3,500-square-foot office, based downtown, combines six examination rooms equipped with interactive displays and two body scanners that collect data via wearable sensors. "Health care is not a repair shop but an ongoing relationship," says Forward CEO Adrian Aoun, a former Alphabet executive who co-founded Forward with Ilya Abyzov, an Uber executive who helped launched uberX; Erik Frey, who led artificial intelligence initiatives at Google; and Rob Sebastian, who led product strategy for several GoogleX moonshot projects. "We want proactive preventive health care that is data-driven, but do it at lower prices," says Aoun, who was motivated to tackle health after a younger relative of his suffered a heart attack in 2015 -- then was hit with a $100,000 medical bill.

The most annoying thing about airports is going through security. But a startup called Evolv Technology is getting set to begin public tests of a new AI-powered body scanner, which it claims will allow people to saunter through checkpoints without breaking stride or emptying their pockets. The Guardian reports that Evolv has built its scanner using the same millimeter-wave imaging frequencies as existing (and often controversial) full-body scanners. But instead of having someone stand still in a circular booth, the company scans its radar beams up and down people as they walk, measuring how the waves scatter off them. The data isn't used to create an image like those normally shown to security staff. Instead, it's processed by a machine-learning algorithm that's been trained to spot dangerous items like explosives and weapons.