One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. "I wish I could talk in Technicolor," she said. And, at another point, "I can see the molecules. Were some families maybe--oh, I don't know--eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to "Father Knows Best" or "The Perry Como Show" afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman's televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less ...

We have used analog VLSI technology to model a class of small os(cid:173) cillating biological neural circuits known as central pattern gener(cid:173) ators (CPG). These circuits generate rhythmic patterns of activity which drive locomotor behaviour in the animal. We have designed, fabricated, and tested a model neuron circuit which relies on many of the same mechanisms as a biological central pattern generator neuron, such as delays and internal feedback. We show that this neuron can be used to build several small circuits based on known biological CPG circuits, and that these circuits produce patterns of output which are very similar to the observed biological patterns. To date, researchers in applied neural networks have tended to focus on mam(cid:173) malian systems as the primary source of potentially useful biological information.

We present an overview of the control, recognition, decision-making, and learning techniques utilized by the Interaction Lab (robotics.usc.edu/interaction) at the University of Southern California (USC) to enable autonomy in sociable and socially assistive robots. These techniques are implemented with two software libraries: 1) the Social Behavior Library (SBL) provides autonomous social behavior controllers; and 2) the Social Interaction Manager (SIM) provides probabilistic models to recognize, reason over, and learn about human behavior. Both libraries are implemented in the Robot Operating System (ROS; www.ros.org)

For senior IT people, 2019 may not look to be the happiest of new years. Many experienced technologists are finding their roles outsourced, with other employers looking for only younger (read: cheaper) employees. "I had three jobs in three years," Mike, a 50-something New York-based IT specialist, told me a year ago. "They've all ended with even new hires being let go and the work outsourced. I had to go before a judge to explain my financial situation, and he said I should take a class to update my skills. As if that would fix it."

Two classic science-fiction films -- "Blade Runner" and "The Running Man" -- are both set in 2019, and although the films envisioned a few details that aren't a reality right now, many of their themes nailed current modern life in America. "I call science fiction'reality ahead of schedule,'" Syd Mead, the celebrated designer behind "Blade Runner," tells The Post. Watch these films now, and you can see many parallels between their fictional worlds and the real one we're living in this very year. Ridley Scott's 1982 film "Blade Runner" told the story of a detective (Harrison Ford) tasked with hunting rogue humanoids known as "replicants," played by Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer. "The Running Man," which hit theaters in 1987, concerned a police officer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) falsely imprisoned by the totalitarian state and made to perform on a top-rated game show, which forces convicts to run from heavily armed pursuers through a dystopian maze. While the events of the films are too exaggerated to be real, the two movies are set in a world affected by climate change and technological upheaval, both of which can be seen today.

Artificial intelligence robots are turbocharging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, or motor neurone disease. The condition, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure. There are only two drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally and there is no cure for the disease, famously suffered by cosmologist Stephen Hawking. "Many doctors call it the worst disease in medicine and the unmet need is huge," said Richard Mead of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, who has found artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up his work. They analyze huge chemical, biological and medical databases, alongside reams of scientific papers, far quicker than humanly possible, throwing up new biological targets and potential drugs.

Artificial intelligence robots are turbocharging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. The condition attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure. There are only two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally, and there is no cure. "Many doctors call it the worst disease in medicine, and the unmet need is huge," said Richard Mead of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, who has found artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up his work.

LONDON (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence robots are turbo-charging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, or motor neurone disease. The condition, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure. There are only two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally and there is no cure for the disease, famously suffered by cosmologist Stephen Hawking. "Many doctors call it the worst disease in medicine and the unmet need is huge," said Richard Mead of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, who has found artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up his work. They analyze huge chemical, biological and medical databases, alongside reams of scientific papers, far quicker than humanly possible, throwing up new biological targets and potential drugs.

The 2016 Summit will explore revolutionary applications of artificial intelligence that actually accelerate research outcomes in fields important to people living in rural communities in Wyoming and around the globe: biotech and health care delivery; energy; information security; transportation; agriculture; mobile financing; clean water and air; and communication. A reception with Gov. Mead will get things started Thursday evening at Jackson's Lift restaurant and the governor will follow that up with a press conference at 12:40 p.m. the following day. A complete agenda for the event can be found here. The Wyoming Global Technology Summit is the flagship event held annually in Jackson, for the Jackson Hole Technology Partnership. The summit annually gathers globally successful founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, financiers and scientists from many relevant disciplines, in addition to Wyoming entrepreneurs, thought leaders and nonprofit and public service groups.

SINCE nobody really knows how brains work, those researching them must often resort to analogies. A common one is that a brain is a sort of squishy, imprecise, biological version of a digital computer. But analogies work both ways, and computer scientists have a long history of trying to improve their creations by taking ideas from biology. The trendy and rapidly developing branch of artificial intelligence known as "deep learning", for instance, takes much of its inspiration from the way biological brains are put together. The general idea of building computers to resemble brains is called neuromorphic computing, a term coined by Carver Mead, a pioneering computer scientist, in the late 1980s.