In 2019, Greta Gerwig became the latest in a line of writers, directors, and producers to make a pilgrimage to a toy workshop in El Segundo, California. Touring the facility, the Mattel Design Center, has become a rite of passage for Hollywood types who are considering transforming one of the company's products into a movie--a list that now includes such names as J. J. Abrams (Hot Wheels) and Vin Diesel (Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots). The building has hundreds of workspaces for artists, model-makers, and project managers, and it houses elaborate museum-style exhibitions that document the company's history and core products. These displays can help a toy designer find inspiration; they can also offer a "brand immersion"--a crash course in a Mattel property slated for adaptation. When a V.I.P. visits, Richard Dickson, a tall, bespectacled man who is the company's chief operating officer, plays the role of Willy Wonka. He'll show off the sixty-five-year-old machines that are still used to affix fake hair to Barbies; he'll invite you to inspect life-size, road-ready replicas of Hot Wheels cars. The center even boasts a giant rendering of Castle Grayskull, the fearsome ancestral home of He-Man.

Ms. Kinstler is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and has previously written about technology and culture. "Alexa, are we humans special among other living things?" One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. But after some cajoling from Mr. Boettcher (Alexa was having trouble accessing a script that he had provided), she revised her response. "I believe that animals have souls, as do plants and even inanimate objects," she said. "But the divine essence of the human soul is what sets the human being above and apart. Mr. Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked me to rate Alexa's response on a scale from 1 to 7. I gave it a 3 -- I wasn't sure that we humans should be set "above and apart" from other ...

The US military is set to use'corona-killing robots' equip with ultraviolet light (UV) to disinfect enclosed spaces. The four-wheeled autonomous robots would eliminate the need of human workers and complete the task in a matter of hours, instead of days. The technology is capable of radiating nearly 110 watts using a vertical UV mount that disinfects a surface two feet away in just over a minute. Although experts have not yet determined if UV kills the virus, the military said it is'employing double the wattage known to kill other coronavirus variants to ensure effectiveness,' Military.com The four-wheeled autonomous robots would eliminate the need of human workers and complete the task in a matter of hours, instead of days.

Washington – As COVID-19 tests become more widely available across the U.S., scientists have warned about a growing concern: Many people with negative results might actually have the virus. That could have devastating implications as a global recession looms and governments wrangle with the question of when to reopen economies shuttered with billions of people ordered to stay home in an effort to stop transmissions of the deadly disease. The majority of tests around the world use a technology called PCR, which detects pieces of the coronavirus in mucus samples. But "there are a lot of things that impact whether or not the test actually picks up the virus," said Priya Sampathkumar, an infectious diseases specialist at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. "It depends on how much virus the person is shedding (through sneezing, coughing and other bodily functions), how the test was collected and whether it was done appropriately by someone used to collecting these swabs, and then how long it sat in transport," she said.

Do you ever feel as if your voice assistants – whether Siri, Alexa, or Google – don't understand you? You might repeat your question a little slower, a little louder, but eventually you'll get the information you were asking for read back to you in the pleasing but lifeless tones of your voice-activated assistant. That's the question facing many of the 3 million people in the United States who stutter, plus the thousands of others who have impaired speech not limited to stuttering, and many are feeling left out. "When this stuff first started coming out, I was all over it," said Jacquelyn Joyce Revere, a screenwriter from Los Angeles who stutters. "In LA, I need GPS all the time, so this seemed like a more convenient way to live the life I want to live."

On a recent Sunday at the Queen Anne Lutheran Church basement, parishioners sat transfixed as the Rev. Dr. Ted Peters discussed an unusual topic for an afternoon assembly: "Can technology enhance the image of God?" Peters' discussion focused on a relatively new philosophical movement. Its followers believe humans will transcend their physical and mental limitations with wearable and implantable devices. The movement, called transhumanism, claims that in the future, humans will be smarter and stronger and may even overcome aging and death through developments in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI). "What does it mean to be truly human?" Peters asked in a voice that boomed throughout the church basement, in a city that boasts one of the world's largest tech hubs.

Unlocking patterns and trends in medical data will be integral to solving healthcare's most pressing problems in predictive and preventative care. In 1854, Dr. John Snow mapped hundreds of homes in London to determine that the cholera outbreak originated at a single water pump. Dr. Snow's work was the birth of modern medical data analysis. Coupling those analytics with artificial intelligence, wearable medical devices, cloud computing, and aggregated and integrated patient data will soon provide you with real-time knowledge to improve patient care and outcomes at the individual and macro-levels of society. Physicians at the University of Miami Health System are already using predictive analytics software that scans and interprets thousands of patients' medical records to uncover trends.

As the skills gap widens for software developers, machine-learning specialists are stepping in with collaboration platforms designed to streamline time-consuming tasks such as tracking down technical solutions when working with new technologies. Collokia, a New York-based startup, announced the beta launch of a machine-learning platform last month that uses artificial intelligence to promote greater collaboration in software development. The other goal is reducing the "technical debt" of development teams by using AI to track down relevant information about a technology project, including information that already resides in company systems. The platform edits and updates search results as a way to disseminate information more widely among development teams. Automation tools that leverage AI promise to address the growing shortfall of qualified software engineers.

From harnessing artificial intelligence to understanding our origins, a panel of distinguished scientists outlined the grand challenges for science in the 21st century. Held at Nanyang Technological University and moderated by independent writer and lecturer Tor Norretranders, the panel session comprised Sydney Brenner, Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine; W. Brian Arthur, external professor at the Santa Fe Institute; Astronomer Royal Martin Rees; Terrence Sejnowski, Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; and Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science. The scientific industry has seen a marked shift towards industrial science--or science that directly benefits the economy--and away from basic research, said Sydney Brenner, a senior fellow at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. He lamented that scientists today lack a crucial truth-seeking mentality, by accepting the results of published research without challenging assumptions. In science, where research is built upon research--which potentially leads to an accumulation of mistakes--the practice of critical evaluation is all the more pertinent, Brenner said.

Imagine a future in which a personal travel assistant looks over your schedule, checks traffic for you, tells you when to leave for an appointment, ferrets out parking spaces and alerts people of your arrival time -- all while learning your driving patterns to get more helpful over time. That assistant will be BMW Connected, whose first version made its debut Thursday at Build 2016, Microsoft's developer conference in San Francisco. "Mobility needs are unique and personal and a very important aspect of our everyday life," says Thom Brenner, BMW Group vice president of Digital Life. "We are really focused on how we can integrate our offerings smoothly and seamlessly into the digital life of our customers." Powered by the Open Mobility Cloud, which is based on Microsoft Azure, and available for iOS, BMW Connected is part of the automaker's vision for the "future of mobility," which includes digital services, automated driving and assistance, and interiors designed for digital seamlessness.