An Apple Watch-style smart collar for dogs will be able to track its heart rate and other vital signs when it goes on sale in the summer, its developers claim. Built by GPS tracking company Invoxia, the smart collar will also double as a GPS and activity tracker, and is expected to cost at least $99 when it goes on sale. Previous generations of dog fitness trackers relied on a combination of GPS sensors and an accelerometer, but the new device also makes use of artificial intelligence. The Invoxia team, based in Issy les Moulineaux, France, used radar sensors that use light to send signals into, and receive data back, from the skin of the dog. They worked with veterinary cardiologists to train AI that can gather data from the sensors and and fill in any missing information blocked by fur.

In 1953, a Harvard psychologist thought he discovered pleasure – accidentally – within the cranium of a rat. With an electrode inserted into a specific area of its brain, the rat was allowed to pulse the implant by pulling a lever. It kept returning for more: insatiably, incessantly, lever-pulling. In fact, the rat didn't seem to want to do anything else. Seemingly, the reward centre of the brain had been located. More than 60 years later, in 2016, a pair of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers were training an AI to play video games. The goal of one game – Coastrunner – was to complete a racetrack. But the AI player was rewarded for picking up collectable items along the track.

A Florida man recently had a brain-eating parasitic pork tapeworm removed from his eyeball that threatened to turn him blind. Sam Cordero initially thought he was seeing a black dot moving from left to right, until he realized the dot was actually a pork tapeworm that had made its home in his left eye. According to Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, "Taenia solium infection (taeniasis) is an intestinal infection with adult tapeworms that follows ingestion of contaminated pork." While a tapeworm might find its way into a human's body when one consumes raw pork or comes in contact with contaminated human feces, it seldom travels through a person's intestines, into one's bloodstream and embed itself in one's brain or eye ball. However, in Cordero's case -- which is one of the 20 recorded cases of tapeworms reaching human eyes in the world -- the insect settled down in his eye's vitreous chamber, which is a fluid filled area behind Cordero's lens and cornea.

These incredible pictures show the awesome beauty of science. From more than 3,500 entries, judges at the Royal Photographic Society Images of Science Competition have named these as the best. Winners include the jaw-droppingly detailed picture of a pork tapeworm, an amazing glimpse at the experiment trying to unlock the secrets of the universe and a unique perspective of a glowstick. Most of the pictures are not usually visible to the human eye and can only be captured with specialist equipment. They show the natural world at its most complex, offering seldom seen detail of their subjects.