The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is developing a new a facial recognition payment system that will allow users to authorize online transactions with their faces. The system will be released by 2015 to both individual customers and retailers. Zhou Xi, the director of the CAS Chongqing Green Technology Research

Pop-up mass transit system, Bridj has had double the reasons to revel as it announced last week that it had acquired $4 million in funding to build on its innovative idea on mass transit and to top it, they hired Gabe Klein as its new Chief Operating Officer. What Uber

In a landmark scientific breakthrough, an international team of neuroscientists has been able to carry out ‘direct and non-invasive brain-to-brain transmission of information between humans,’ sitting 5000 miles apart, between India and France. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess

Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, in partnership with scientists from several institutes in California, has launched its hardware initiative to design and build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics. An alliance between Google, NASA Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), the Quantum Artificial Intelligence

In a bid to reach out to more retail companies, IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson might be utilised to fabricate ‘fashion’ apps that overlay structured and unstructured data to help people decide what to wear. While at the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, IBM Watson’s global retail transformation leader Keith Mercier spoke

Facebook is apparently flagging articles for satirical content. Of course, it can’t work: sarcasm is about cultural context and shared assumptions and a computer capable of understanding it would be very close to the almost-human AIs of science fiction. But fielding requests for magic is an experience familiar to anybody

NASA has zeroed in on four innovative concepts proposed by students and faculties of various institutes, regarding the ‘Innovative uses of climate projections and Earth-observing satellite data’. A follow up challenge asks participants to create an application or algorithm that communicates climate change impacts to the general public using the

IBM’s Watson Discovery Advisor is now available as a Cognitive Cloud Computing platform and will enable researchers to analyze big data in more ways than one. Released last week, the service will “accelerate the pace of scientific breakthroughs by discovering previously unknown connections in Big Data.” “We’re entering an extraordinary

If you’ve been on social media in the past couple of weeks, you’ll undoubtedly have seen videos of people chucking freezing cold water on their head. Mass lunacy? Quite possibly, but it’s also for a good cause; the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. We’ll refrain from joining the throngs of media

Datanyze, the sales prospecting tool powered by technology data, grabbed $2 million in seed funding round on Tuesday. The round was led by investors like IDG Ventures and saw others like AngelList, Neeraj Agrawal, Google Ventures, and Mark Cuban. “Datanyze enables salespeople to uncover not only who is using a