Plants have been observed to interact with the environment in ways that one scientists has claimed proves they are conscious. Paco Calvo, a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, has been researching plant intelligence and problem-solving for years, finding the mimosa appears to'learn from experience' when it stops folding up. 'In psychology that's the most basic form of learning,' Calvo told DailyMail.com. 'This pattern of folding, then not folding any more, is consistent with the idea that this plant has learned something as a result of experience, not from its genes.' The professor also noted that other plants communicate with each other through chemicals, solve problems, and even appear to have memories.

Scientists have proposed a new international framework to keep ethics and human wellbeing at the forefront of our relationship with technology. From gene therapy and AI-predicted disease to self-driving cars and 3D printing, advances in technology can improve health, free up time, and boost efficiency. However despite the best intentions of its creators, technology might lead to unintended consequences for individual privacy and autonomy. There's currently no internationally agreed-upon regulation about who, for example, has access to the data recorded by black boxes in cars, smart TVs and voice enabled personal assistants - and recent findings have shown that technology can be used to influence voting behaviour. Now, Imperial College London researchers have suggested a new regulatory framework with which governments can minimise unintended consequences of our relationship with technology.

Jean-Philip Poulin was feeling "joyful" and "excited" when I interviewed him recently in Montreal. I know this because he showed me his real-time emotion metrics during our conversation, which were being parsed by a machine-learning algorithm that uses heart-rate data transmitted from his Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker. Poulin is the COO of Sensaura, a Montreal-based software startup that proposes to bridge the gap between consumer wearables and affective computing. If its founders are as successful as they believe they will be, their product will hasten the inevitable future of emotionally intelligent machines: video games will know when you're bored, advertisers will know when you're swayed, and mental health professionals will know when you need a check-in. So far, progress in affective computing has depended on facial recognition software, which reads people's emotions pretty much the same way that people do: by looking at their faces for cues.