Dutch Family ‘Waiting For End of Time’ Discovered In Basement

A family who spent nine years in a basement “waiting for the end of time” have been discovered by police in the Netherlands after one of them turned up at a local pub, reports say. The BBC reports: A man of 58 and a family with young adults aged 18 to 25 were living at a farm in the province of…

An AI Pioneer Wants His Algorithms To Understand the ‘Why’

Deep learning is good at finding patterns in reams of data, but can’t explain how they’re connected. Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio wants to change that. From a report: In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning — the technique that triggered a renaissance…

Could A Scalp-Zapping Cap Help Reverse Male Balding?

“An electric patch makes hairless mice grow fur and may reverse balding in men when fitted inside a specially designed baseball cap,” reports New Scientist: At the moment, men who don’t want to go bald can treat hair loss using minoxidil lotion, finasteride pills or hair transplant surgery. But minoxidil doesn’t work for everyone, finasteride can reduce sex drive and fertility,…

IBM’s New 53-qubit Quantum Computer is Its Biggest Yet

IBM’s 14th quantum computer is its most powerful so far, a model with 53 of the qubits that form the fundamental data-processing element at the heart of the system. From a report: The system, available online to quantum computing customers in October, is a big step up from the last IBM Q machine with 20 qubits and should help advance the…

Apple Patents Watch Band That Could ID You From Your Wrist Skin

PatentlyApple has spotted several patents that suggest Apple is playing with the idea of making the Apple Watch’s band identify users via their wrist’s skin texture and arm hair. TechCrunch reports: The first patent describes a sensor built into the Watch or the watch’s band that could use infrared to build a thermal image of your wrist and its identifying traits…