An office worker answers it and hears his boss, in a panic, tell him that she forgot to transfer money to the new contractor before she left for the day and needs him to do it. She gives him the wire transfer information, and with the money transferred, the crisis has been averted. The worker sits back in his chair, takes a deep breath, and watches as his boss walks in the door. The voice on the other end of the call was not his boss. The voice he heard was that of an audio deepfake, a machine-generated audio sample designed to sound exactly like his boss.

It seems like robots could learn from roaches. Researchers from the University of Cologne in Germany have discovered a change in roaches' gait that could help teach robots to walk. Animal's gait was previously only analyzed in fast mammals. Researchers have now found that arthropods that run quickly, like roaches, change their gait at mid-speed. Experts said the change in gait in roaches (Nauphoeta cinerea) is similar to the way horses switch from trop to gallop.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, 'Matrix'-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. One leading expert say he would'appeal to the compassion and empathy that the superintelligence has to keep me, a compassionate and empathetic person, alive' Why should a superintelligence keep us around? I would argue that I am a good person who might have even helped to bring about the superintelligence itself.

Researchers have developed a mini autonomous blimp that can detect hands and faces. It consists of a 3-D printed gondola frame and a mini camera attached to a balloon. The researchers say that blimp could be useful when shopping at large stores, as it would be able to interact with humans and guide them to the correct aisle. All the while, the machine gathers information about the operator, such as hesitant glares and eager smiles - with the researchers' goal to better understand how people interact with flying robots. 'Roboticists and psychologists have learned many things about how humans relate to robots on the ground, but we haven't created techniques to study how we react to flying machines,' says Dr Fumin Zhang, the Georgia Tech associate professor leading the blimp project.

A new study has revealed that not all are doomed in a robot takeover. Researchers have discovered that people who are more intelligent and who showed an interest in the arts and sciences while in high school are less likely to fall victim to automation. The team concluded that these individuals are more likely to choose jobs that are more creative or have a higher degree of complexity that is not routine - two areas where robots fall short. Researchers at the University of Houston analyzed personality and background factors in order to determine whether a person will select jobs that are more likely to be automated in the future. The team used a dataset of 346,660 people from the American Institutes of Research.

In America, 60 percent of digital media consumption now occurs on mobile or tablet devices instead of desktop computers. As people and technology have become increasingly mobile, so have their efforts to find love and sex. According to app analytics website AppAnnie, the dating application Tinder is one of the most popular tools to pursue modern romance and has been ranked as the most downloaded lifestyle app in America for nearly two years. As a social psychologist, I've focused my research on exploring why Tinder – as one of my interview participants put it – is so'evilly satisfying.' A researcher set out to explore why Tinder is so'evilly satisfying' and conducted a study with singles who use the app and those who do not A researcher from the University of Hawaii conducted a survey with a group of Tinder users and singles who do not use the app.

COMPUTERS can already hold a massive amount of instantly retrievable data in a manner that puts most humans to shame, but getting them to actually display intelligence is an entirely different challenge. Now a team of researchers from Northwestern University just made a huge stride toward that goal with a computational model that actually outperforms the average American adult in a standard intelligence test. As PhysOrg reports, the witty computer system utilizes an AI platform called CogSketch that gives it the power to solve visual problems just by looking at them, which is something that has traditionally held back many examples of artificial intelligence, reports the New York Post. Being able to visually understand, interpret, and then use that data to come to a solution brings the computer system closer to the functioning of the human brain than many before it, and so the team pitted its creation against a popular standardised test called Raven's Progressive Matrices. The Raven's test (or RPM for short) is composed of 60 multiple-choice questions that measure the taker's ability to reason, using visual puzzles.

Researchers have revealed exactly what mobile phone users type most - and say that'I love you' is the most popular three word sentence. The team at SwiftKey analysed web data along with anonymous data from their hugely popular alternative keyboard, which has been downloaded to more than 100 million devices, and also found phone users are extremely polite. The single most commonly used one word sentence in English is'thanks' and the most popular two word phrase is'thank you'. What we REALLY type: The single most commonly used one word sentence in English is'thanks' and the most popular two word phrase is'thank you', according to mobile keyboard firm SwiftKey The firm has created alternative keyboard which are among the most download android apps, and recently released a version for Apple handsets. They use a machine learning algorithm to predict what a user will type, constantly refining its ability as it learns how users type.

When a newborn first opens its eyes, it sees the world around it as blurry shapes. But a few months later, its vision starts to focus and it will start to recognize people and objects. Researchers at UNC's School of Medicine have found out more about how the brains of baby mammal's develop as they refine their sense of sight, and the research may also help restore sight for people with vision problems. When a newborn first opens its eyes, it sees the world around it as blurry shapes. The research, which was conducted on mice and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is part of a wider project that aims to maps the areas of the brain that play key roles in vision processing.

Finally a new year is here after the most politically divisive 12 months in a very long time. In the UK, Brexit shattered dreams and friendships. In the US, the polarisation was already huge, but a bitter election campaign made the divisions even deeper. A researcher from King's College London explains how we start with fairly small opinions about an issue to being fully entrenched, as many may not have been for one side during Brexit but were completely sure their opinions were in fact right How is it possible that people come to hold such widely different views of reality? And what can we do (if anything) to break out of the cycle of increasingly hostile feelings towards people who seem to be on'the other side' from us?