Researchers have developed arrays of AI-controlled cameras and microphones to identify animals and birds and to monitor their movements in the wild – technology, they say, that should help tackle Britain's growing biodiversity problem. The robot monitors have been tested at three sites and have captured sounds and images from which computers were able to identify specific species and map their locations. Dozens of different birds were recognised from their songs while foxes, deer, hedgehogs and bats were pinpointed and identified by AI analysis. No human observers are involved. "The crucial point is the scale of the operation," said Anthony Dancer, a conservation specialist at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

The truth is out there. When I was a kid, my brother and I made a UFO out of paper plates, tin foil and marbles. Then we got on the roof with our spaceship dangling from a fishing line and, using our mom's plastic 110 camera, captured incontrovertible proof that we are not alone in the universe. But when everything went digital, creation and distribution both got easier, faster and more broadly distributed. And artificial intelligence (AI) will take it to a whole new level, enabling anyone to create perfect fakes of difficult-to-fake media, like video and audio.

Brain‐inspired neuromorphic computing has the potential to revolutionize the current computing paradigm with its massive parallelism and potentially low power consumption. However, the existing approaches of using digital complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor devices (with "0" and "1" states) to emulate gradual/analog behaviors in the neural network are energy intensive and unsustainable; furthermore, emerging memristor devices still face challenges such as nonlinearities and large write noise. Here, an electrochemical graphene synapse, where the electrical conductance of graphene is reversibly modulated by the concentration of Li ions between the layers of graphene is presented. This fundamentally different mechanism allows to achieve a good energy efficiency ( 500 fJ per switching event), analog tunability ( 250 nonvolatile states), good endurance, and retention performances, and a linear and symmetric resistance response. Essential neuronal functions such as excitatory and inhibitory synapses, long‐term potentiation and depression, and spike timing dependent plasticity with good repeatability are demonstrated. The scaling study suggests that this simple, two‐dimensional synapse is scalable in terms of switching energy and speed.

That's the rough amount of money that counterfeiters displaced last year by selling phony products. Some 2.5% of all trade is for fake goods. The United States is hit hardest by the scourge of counterfeit products -- U.S. brands accounted in 2013 for 20% of the world's infringed intellectual property. When most people think about counterfeiting, they think of knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags sold on the sidewalk. But fake products also include business and enterprise products, as well as everyday consumer goods.

The arms race is on: Counterfeiters will use AI to create convincing fakes; smart enterprises will use AI to fight back. Half a trillion dollars.That's the rough amount of money that counterfeiters displaced last year by selling phony products. Some 2.5% of all trade is for fake goods. The United States is hit hardest by the scourge of counterfeit products -- U.S. brands accounted in 2013 for 20% of the world's infringed intellectual property.

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Humans have broken the Internet. Cyberbullying, harassment, social shaming, and sheer unpleasantness plague such sites as Twitter and Reddit, especially if you happen to attract the wrong sort of attention. Consider the way Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones and public relations executive Justine Sacco became targets for mass abuse. The companies that run online services are typically squeezed between charges of indifference to harassment and suppression of free speech. But now Google thinks it can use artificial intelligence to lessen this tragedy of the digital commons.