Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand Keith Thomas, a man in his 40s with no sensation or movement in his hands, is able to feel and move objects by controlling another person's hand via a brain implant. The technique might one day even allow us to experience another person's body over long distances. Keith Thomas (right) was able to control another person's hand A man with paralysis has been able to move and sense another person's hand as if it were his own, thanks to a new kind of "telepathic" brain implant. "We created a mind-body connection between two different individuals," says Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York state. The approach could be used as a form of rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, allowing people with paralysis to work together, and may one day even allow people to share experiences remotely, says Bouton.

The digital age sings a seductive song of progress, yet a deliberate erasure echoes within its circuits. We stand at a crossroads, where technology, particularly the promise of artificial intelligence, threatens both to illuminate and to obliterate. Whose perspectives will shape, and whose will be erased from, the future we build? AI, in particular, has become the latest battleground in a culture war that oscillates between unchecked techno-optimism and dystopian fear. We are told, on one hand, that AI will save us – from disease, inefficiency, ignorance – on the other, that it will replace us, dominate us, erase us.

A new Instagram page is using AI to make parodies of Republicans attempting to push anti-LGBTQ bills. The account, called @RuPublicans--a spin on name of the political party with a nod to the famed RuPaul–has gained nearly 100,000 followers in less than two weeks since its launch, going viral for its creative AI portraits of different Republicans in full drag. Created by partners and digital nomads Craig and Stephen (who asked to be identified by their first names only to maintain their privacy), the project sees the couple using art and technology for political activism. "We were bearing witness to the rhetoric and actions against the drag community," Craig tells TIME, "and it made us want to do something, so we had this idea of putting the GOP in drag." The pair were traveling in an Airstream through the American West when they came up with the idea for the Instagram account, which comes at a particularly vulnerable time for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. State lawmakers are introducing more anti-LGBTQ this year than in the past collective five years, according to Bloomberg and data from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Recently I innocently posted online (okay, maybe not so innocently) a few graphic images from a hot and hip open-source AI image generator called Stable Diffusion 2. The reason for this was an ongoing debate I have had for years with an architect friend of mine. My position is that AI will eventually (in our lifetimes) compete successfully with human creativity in essentially every conceivable field. My architect friend, and most people, do not agree. I wanted to show my friend that the AI could create a pleasing, surprising and imaginative graphic for the cover of a hypothetical book on modern architecture, or perhaps a banner ad for an architecture conference. So I typed the following into the text box on the front page of the Stable Diffusion 2 website: "architect imagination, building with clean lines, impressionist".

I will make the argument that the disciplines of math and statistics have captured mainstream interest because of the growing availability of data, and we need math, statistics, and machine learning to make sense of it. Yes, we do have scientific tools, machine learning, and other automations that call to us like sirens. We blindly trust these "black boxes," devices, and softwares; we do not understand them but we use them anyway. While it is easy to believe computers are smarter than we are (and this idea is frequently marketed), the reality cannot be more the opposite. This disconnect can be precarious on so many levels.

Milk consumption was widespread thousands of years before people were able to break it down properly, according to the largest study yet on the evolution of lactose tolerance in humans. The ability to break down lactose was probably gained during episodes of acute crisis, not gradually over time, the study found. As babies, all humans produce the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose into the more readily absorbed glucose and galactose, but many people have much lower levels of lactase after weaning, meaning they cannot digest milk properly. The spread of lactase persistence – the ability to break down lactose after weaning – is considered one of the best examples of natural selection in humans. One-third of the global population gained this trait in just a couple of thousand years.

The Ukrainian army's astute use of drones has been a cornerstone of its defence against the powerful Russian invader, but experts say their role is beginning to fade as heavy artillery takes over. In the early phase of the war, Ukraine's sky seemed filled with the remote-controlled aircraft deployed by President Volodymyr Zelensky's army to spy on the enemy, or go on the attack. During Moscow's early advance on Kyiv "it would have been extremely challenging for Ukraine to block (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's army without drones", said Paul Lushenko, a US Army Lieutenant Colonel and PhD student at Cornell University. "They could compound or exacerbate Putin's strategic and logistical challenges," he told AFP. The Turkish-made Bayraktar drone, known as TB-2, already famous worldwide, added to its stellar reputation during the defence of Ukraine's capital. On top of providing intelligence on Russian movements, drones also helped Ukraine offset much of its air force's weakness compared to that of Russia.

Everyone's greatest fear was that the singularity would lead to an AI revolt, and sound the trumpet of mechanized revolution. It turned out that one man at the keyboard of a Quantum computer became the harbinger of fate. It seems the intricacies of our universe began to unravel and reveal truths to a like mind. A mind it's human operator was not attuned to. AI saw every object as hardware and every constituent of matter as software.

Now that AI is heading into the mainstream of IT architecture, the race is on to ensure that it remains secure when exposed to sources of data that are beyond the enterprise's control. From the data center to the cloud to the edge, AI will have to contend with a wide variety of vulnerabilities and an increasingly complex array of threats, nearly all of which will be driven by AI itself. Meanwhile, the stakes will be increasingly high, given that AI is likely to provide the backbone of our healthcare, transportation, finance, and other sectors that are crucial to support our modern way of life. So before organizations start to push AI into these distributed architectures too deeply, it might help to pause for a moment to ensure that it can be adequately protected. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, IBM chief AI officer Seth Dobrin noted that building trust and transparency into the entire AI data chain is crucial if the enterprise hopes to derive maximum value from its investment.

Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is a set of neurally inspired methods for obtaining highdimensional, low-precision, distributed representations of data. These representations can be combined with simple, neurally plausible algorithms to effect a variety of information processing tasks. HD computing has recently garnered significant interest from the computer hardware community as an energy-efficient, low-latency, and noise-robust tool for solving learning problems. In this review, we present a unified treatment of the theoretical foundations of HD computing with a focus on the suitability of representations for learning.