Though every month we read about some new advance in artificial intelligence, how much progress is really being made?  Neuromorphic computing has created software and electronic hardware that mimic brain functions and signal protocols but, like economic models that successfully predict the past, they have only slightly improved the efficiency and adaptability of conventional technology and are not really making bold advances. 

Male partners of infertile obese females may increase the odds of conceiving a child by improving their own weight and dietary habits, preliminary results from a pilot study from Canada suggest. The results will be presented Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego.

Since they were pioneered by Robert Hooke 350 years ago, microscopes have been extending our vision. In the 21st century, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal microscopy, which uses a pinhole to remove out-of-focus light and allows 3D structures to be built from multiple images, have pushed the boundaries of resolution.

In this country, poor diet, obesity and high rates of smoking have compounded to give nearly 75 percent of adults poor cardiovascular health.

It's not the United States, it is China, yet an alarming number of health plans promoted by American nutrition pundits advocate Asian lifestyles. 

The 2010 China Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance Group collected cardiovascular health data from a nationally representative sample of more than 96,000 men and women in the general Chinese population.

When there’s a report in the news about the latest science on climate change, the source is very often the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This body plays a very important role in global climate change policy around the world. Its reports, five of which have been published since 1990, enjoy a degree of credibility that renders them influential for public opinion. And more important, the reports are accepted as the definitive source by international negotiators working under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

A history of psychedelic drug use is associated fewer suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts, according to survey results analyzed by Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

In a national survey of over 190,000 U.S. adults, lifetime use of certain psychedelic drugs was associated with a 19 percent reduced likelihood of psychological distress within the past month, a 14 percent reduced likelihood of suicidal thinking within the past year, a 29 percent reduced likelihood of suicide planning within the past year and a 36 percent reduced likelihood of attempting suicide within the past year. 

By Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University

When I was an awkward teenager who did not fit in with the other kids, the logical Mr. Spock was a character I could really identify with. At this time, I did not know why I related to Spock because when I was a teenager, I did not know that my thinking process was different from that of most other people. I assumed that my logical picture-based thinking was the way that everybody thought.

Apple has found a new use for their iPhone - medicine. People had already created lots of apps, of course, but ResearchKit, due out next month, is the first Apple framework to make it easier. 

The framework allows new ways to create apps to track movement, take measurements, and record data and has three active modules: surveys, informed consent, and active tasks. Active tasks is the only one not intuitive - it means they can ask you to perform activities while the sensors are monitoring.

Amid all the dire warnings that machines run by artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take over from humans we need to think more about how we program them in the first place.

The technology may be too far off to seriously entertain these worries – for now – but much of the distrust surrounding AI arises from misunderstandings in what it means to say a machine is “thinking”.

One of the current aims of AI research is to design machines, algorithms, input/output processes or mathematical functions that can mimic human thinking as much as possible.

A new paper says they can detect sexism in a smile. 

A man’s true attitude towards the female sex can be detected according to how he smiles and chats to her, according to Jin Goh and Judith Hall of Northeastern University writing in Sex Roles.