Tech News February 8, 2016

We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika Mosquitoes
Fear of the Zika virus could generate support for gene drives, a radical technology able to make species go extinct.

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Tech News February 5, 2016

Intel: Chips Will Have to Sacrifice Speed Gains for Energy Savings
A major technological shift is needed in the next few years if computer chips are to keep improving.

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Will AI-Powered Hedge Funds Outsmart the Market?
Some hedge funds boast that AI algorithms make their trading decisions—but these systems might be more conventional than they seem.

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New Collar Promises to Keep Athletes’ Brains from “Sloshing” During Impact
Researchers have begun human clinical trials for a device, inspired by woodpeckers, that’s meant to keep the brain from moving around so much inside the skull when it gets hit.

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Government Seeks High-Fidelity “Brain-Computer” Interface
A challenge by DARPA asks scientists to develop ways to record from a million neurons at a time.

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The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real

If virtual reality is going to be truly immersive, holding a game controller could be distracting. Companies will instead try to let you control the action with your eyes, head, or fingers.

It’s one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it’s far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet with just your gaze.

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Will Machines Eliminate Us?

People who worry that we’re on course to invent dangerously intelligent machines are misunderstanding the state of computer science.

Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world’s preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning. The startling capabilities that deep learning has given computers in recent years, from human-level voice recognition and image classification to basic conversational skills, have prompted warnings about the progress AI is making toward matching, or perhaps surpassing, human intelligence. Prominent figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have even cautioned that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity. Musk and others are investing millions of dollars in researching the potential dangers of AI, as well as possible solutions. But the direst statements sound overblown to many of the people who are actually developing the technology. Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, put things in perspective in an interview with MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI and robotics, Will Knight.

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Immune System Offers Major Clue to Schizophrenia

A massive genetic study has sketched out a molecular link between schizophrenia and how the brain is shaped in adolescence.

Winning a rare insight into the cause of schizophrenia and possible ways to treat it, scientists in Boston say they have identified a biochemical pathway that contributes to the disease by altering connections between brain cells.
Google’s AI Masters the Game of Go a Decade Earlier Than Expected

Google achieves one of the long-standing “grand challenges” of AI by building a computer that can beat expert players at the board game Go.

Google has taken a brilliant and unexpected step toward building an AI with more humanlike intuition, developing a computer capable of beating even expert human players at the fiendishly complicated board game Go.

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Next Big Test for AI: Making Sense of the World

A new database will gauge progress in artificial intelligence, as computers try to grasp what’s going on in scenes shown in photographs.

A few years ago, a breakthrough in machine learning suddenly enabled computers to recognize objects shown in photographs with unprecedented—almost spooky—accuracy. The question now is whether machines can make another leap, by learning to make sense of what’s actually going on in such images.
First Monkeys with Autism Created in China

They spin in their cages and don’t interact. The scientists who created autistic monkeys say they’ll now try to cure them.

Scientists in China say they used genetic engineering to create monkeys with a version of autism, an achievement that could make it easier to test treatments but that raises thorny practical and ethical questions over how useful such animal models will be.

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Cybersecurity: The Age of the Megabreach

We haven’t stopped huge breaches. The focus now is on resilience, with smarter ways to detect attacks and faster ways to respond to them.

In November 2014, an especially chilling cyberattack shook the corporate world—something that went far beyond garden-variety theft of credit card numbers from a big-box store. Hackers, having explored the internal servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment, captured internal financial reports, top executives’ embarrassing e-mails, private employee health data, and even unreleased movies and scripts and dumped them on the open Web. The offenders were said by U.S. law enforcement to be working at the behest of the North Korean regime, offended by a farcical movie the company had made in which a TV producer is caught up in a scheme to kill the country’s dictator.