Why do horses have eyes on the side of their head? 'You often have to teach horses something on both sides of their body for them to process the information fully.' In the animal kingdom, horses are prey. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Have you ever noticed that horses have eyes on the sides of the head rather than the front, like we do as humans? The location of horses' eyes offer a biological advantage that helps keep them safe as prey animals.

Jeff Bezos likes to surprise. Roaming Amazon's global headquarters in 2013, the tycoon promised a television crew half his fortune if they could guess his company's latest innovation. "Oh my God," one of his wide-eyed guests exclaimed, as they caught sight of autonomous delivery drones. Bezos, a self-declared optimist, suggested it could happen by 2017, or maybe 2018. "I know this looks like science fiction. It's not," he told 60 Minutes on CBS in 2013.

Clinical investigations of anatomy's structural changes over time could greatly benefit from population-level quantification of shape, or spatiotemporal statistic shape modeling (SSM). Such a tool enables characterizing patient organ cycles or disease progression in relation to a cohort of interest. Constructing shape models requires establishing a quantitative shape representation (e.g., corresponding landmarks). Particle-based shape modeling (PSM) is a data-driven SSM approach that captures population-level shape variations by optimizing landmark placement. However, it assumes cross-sectional study designs and hence has limited statistical power in representing shape changes over time. Existing methods for modeling spatiotemporal or longitudinal shape changes require predefined shape atlases and pre-built shape models that are typically constructed cross-sectionally. This paper proposes a data-driven approach inspired by the PSM method to learn population-level spatiotemporal shape changes directly from shape data. We introduce a novel SSM optimization scheme that produces landmarks that are in correspondence both across the population (inter-subject) and across time-series (intra-subject). We apply the proposed method to 4D cardiac data from atrial-fibrillation patients and demonstrate its efficacy in representing the dynamic change of the left atrium. Furthermore, we show that our method outperforms an image-based approach for spatiotemporal SSM with respect to a generative time-series model, the Linear Dynamical System (LDS). LDS fit using a spatiotemporal shape model optimized via our approach provides better generalization and specificity, indicating it accurately captures the underlying time-dependency.

Deepfake technology could soon give anybody with a computer or phone the power of a Hollywood special effects department. In the next several years, technologists predict we will all be able to create photo-realistic videos and sound recordings using software enabled by artificial intelligence. That means instead of using cameras and microphones, next-generation "synthetic media'' will be completely generated by computers. Bill Whitaker looks at the state of the art today and volunteers as a guinea pig in an amazing deepfake transformation in which he becomes 30 years younger. The story will be broadcast on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, October 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Nina Schick, a London-based researcher and political consultant was advising world leaders on Russian disinformation and election security when she first came across deepfakes. They have only gotten better since then. "The incredible thing about deepfakes and synthetic media is the pace of acceleration when it comes to the technology," Schick says. "By five to seven years, we are basically looking at a trajectory where any single creator -- so a YouTuber, a TikToker -- will be able to create the same level of visual effects that is only accessible to the most well-resourced Hollywood studio today." "It is without a doubt one of the most important revolutions in the future of human communication and perception.

Tasting panels and breeding for better taste have been around since agriculture began, and now a researchers at University of Florida are using a new approach to creating better berries. Artificial intelligence is now helping identify cultivars most likely to produce a berry consumers will love. Already having collected data from hundreds and hundreds of volunteer tasters, computers now help match the chemical component that creates aromas of sweetness and "strawberriness." "If we want to say which of these aroma chemicals in the strawberry are actually helping boost the sweetness, our older statistical methods have a really hard time doing that but machine learning has an advantage," said strawberry breeder Dr. Vance Whitaker. He says knowing what chemicals to breed for makes it more clear what his team, and Florida farmers should plant.

Uday Kamath has more than 20 years of experience architecting and building analytics-based commercial solutions. He currently works as the Chief Analytics Officer at Digital Reasoning, one of the leading companies in AI for NLP and Speech Recognition, heading the Applied Machine Learning research group. Most recently, Uday served as the Chief Data Scientist at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, building machine learning products and solutions for the financial industry, focused on fraud, compliance, and cybersecurity. Uday has previously authored many books on machine learning such as Machine Learning: End-to-End guide for Java developers: Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Neural Networks simplified and Mastering Java Machine Learning: A Java developer's guide to implementing machine learning and big data architectures. Uday has published many academic papers in different machine learning journals and conferences.

L.A. Unified requires daily random searches for weapons using metal-detector wands at all of its middle and high school campuses, including Hamilton High. L.A. Unified requires daily random searches for weapons using metal-detector wands at all of its middle and high school campuses, including Hamilton High. Kevin Castillo was in his freshman year at Hamilton High School when administrators carrying hand-held metal detectors interrupted his English class to conduct a random search. They asked a student to pick a number between 1 and 10. The student chose 7, so every seventh person in the class had to gather up belongings and step out of the classroom.

The BBC headquarters in London is getting a new resident: he's tall, bronze and likes a smoke. From Tuesday a statue of novelist George Orwell is to adorn the exterior of New Broadcasting House, a few minutes from where Orwell worked as a radio producer in World War Two. But what was the author of Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell's original worded title) doing in the BBC? For decades its staff have delighted in the suggestion Orwell took his notion of absolute hell from two years spent at the BBC. Near the end of Nineteen Eighty-four (1984 is now more commonly used on book covers), Winston Smith finds himself trapped in the Ministry of Love's Room 101, "many metres underground".

When aliens come, how will they get here? Well, unless they are sly infiltrators of the flesh, they will probably go for the kind of boastful, get-a-load-of-us craft that was immortalized by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." He wrote, "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." That was true of "Independence Day," and it is doubly true of "Arrival," in which a dozen mountainous ovoids--charcoal gray and rough to the touch, like a pumice stone--show up at various locations around Earth. Rather than land, the vessels suspend themselves in dignified fashion, with their tips facing downward and not quite touching the ground.

In the age of online dating there are more romantic options than there are fish in the, well, you know. On the appropriately named site Plenty of Fish, for instance, you can pore over profiles of hundreds or thousands of potential mates before deciding which ones to contact. Such unfettered choice means a better shot at true love--or so many daters believe. The more options you have, the assumption goes, the more likely you are to find the one who truly suits you. Yet many daters are finding that less romantic choice yields top-notch results without all the angst.