Bringing us one step closer to the day when computers compete directly with humans in the arts, a new painting has been created using software to mimic the style of a master. The painting, titled "The Next Rembrandt" (below), is the result of a team of developers who, with the technical support of Microsoft and backing from Dutch bank ING, sought to create an original new work "by Rembrandt" using data from his existing paintings. "When you want to make a new painting you have some idea of how it’s going to look," said Ben Haanstra, a part of the developer team, in a press statement. "But in our case we started from basically nothing — we had to create a whole painting using just data from Rembrandt’s paintings."

An international team of researchers have found evidence of a mysterious new state of matter, first predicted 40 years ago, in a real material. This state, known as a quantum spin liquid, causes electrons - thought to be indivisible building blocks of nature - to break into pieces. The researchers, including physicists from the University of Cambridge, measured the first signatures of these fractional particles, known as Majorana fermions, in a two-dimensional material with a structure similar to graphene. Their experimental results successfully matched with one of the main theoretical models for a quantum spin liquid, known as a Kitaev model. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

Lipid molecules are schizophrenic. One end likes to hang out with a charged crowd (think water); the other prefers neutral neighbors (think fats). Most of us remember those funky illustrations of the bilayer lipid membrane structure that encloses animal cells from high school biology. Recently, Titan supercomputer was used to show cell membranes may be much more than simple scaffolds for proteins and protective enclosures for cells. Rather, researchers are starting to see that lipids and proteins can form small patches, similar to a mosaic and this patchiness seems to have functional roles in the life of a cell and in regulating different processes.

In the world of robot communication, it seems actions speak louder than words. Scientists in the UK have discovered that by getting robot avatars to "talk with their hands," we understand them as well as we do our fellow human beings. Avatars have been in existence since the 1980s and today are used by millions of people across the globe. They are big business too: from artificial intelligence to social media and psychotherapy to high-end video games, they are used to sell things, to solve problems, to teach us and to entertain us.

One reason we don’t yet have robot personal assistants buzzing around doing our chores is because making them is hard. Assembling robots by hand is time-consuming, while automation — robots building other robots — is not yet fine-tuned enough to make robots that can do complex tasks. But if humans and robots can’t do the trick, what about 3-D printers? In a new paper, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) present the first-ever technique for 3-D printing robots that involves printing solid and liquid materials at the same time. The new method allows the team to automatically 3-D print dynamic robots in a single step, with no assembly required, using a commercially-available 3-D printer.

People often ask me about the impact of 3D printing on jobs. Will the technology be a job creator or destroyer? The short answer is, it will take more jobs than it makes — and 3D printing is not alone. Technology will eventually make work obsolete. Our big problems are going to be figuring out how to survive the transition, then figuring out what to do with all that free time.

I’m impatient to see breakthroughs in cars. I have high expectations for what Apple will do and respect for what Tesla has already done. I agree with Peter Thiel on the we-were-promised-jet-cars-but-got-140-characters thing, and with Larry Page, who worries that Silicon Valley doesn’t throw the ball down the field enough. So, with all the talk of the Chevy Bolt Tesla-killer, the will-they-or-won’t-they joint venture of Google and Ford, the Tesla Model 3 March unveil, the intrigue around Apple Car, GM’s unicorn acquisition of the 40-person self-driving car-kit maker Cruise Automation and $4 billion of federal monies for self-driving cars, it’s a great time to take stock.

Computer science jobs are some of the most sought-after positions in the world. And with employers looking for new ways to get involved with the digital revolution every day, hard-working and qualified individuals are more valuable than ever. And if you are looking to cash in on the increasing demand for this exciting field, you’ll need to take into consideration quite a bit of information. Luckily, someone has already done it for you.

In the course of our day-to-day lives, we produce vast amounts of data. Whether gathered through online communications platforms, tracking devices, or other sources, these data reveal information about our behavior, decisions, and preferences. Researchers can ultimately use the data to improve systems across a variety of domains. In the process, there are great challenges and opportunities in the work of understanding the flow of ideas through groups, determining which incentives are effective, measuring network dynamics, and managing the inherent issues of privacy.

Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard. But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube. The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.

The Internet is big—really big! (About one Yottabyte in size, or a quadrillion Gigabytes, which if stored on CDs would stack from earth to moon ... 4000 times.) Did you ever wonder how Google can respond to your search in mere seconds? Your smartphone’s camera records about 8 million pixels when it snaps a photo, and each pixel represents millions of possible colors. That’s millions and millions of possibilities. How does your phone store those pictures in just a few hundred thousand bytes? And when you buy something online using your credit card, why don’t hackers just intercept the webpage and steal your number? (If it were email, they could!).

Technology has transformed how we work, communicate and travel. In contrast, modern digital technology has not yet transformed financial services. Open data is the key to change in this sector of the economy. The time has come for the financial services industry to join the open data revolution. Open data means interoperability of digital information to increase its usability and accessibility. The Obama administration has done much to make open data a cornerstone of its digital government strategy. When open data is brought to the private sector, moreover, one of the benefits will be information portability for consumers. “Informational portability” means that consumers will be able to share and use their personal data in different individual services and products.

With enough computing effort most contemporary security systems will be broken. But a research team at the University of Sydney has made a major breakthrough in generating single photons (light particles), as carriers of quantum information in security systems. The collaboration involving physicists at the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), an ARC Centre of Excellence headquartered in the School of Physics, and electrical engineers from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, has been published in Nature Communications.

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in machine learning technology and potential applications. As a non-expert, you’ve probably either had to assess ML technology for your product and business or as a potential investment. The jargon around ML technology is vast, confusing and, unfortunately, increasingly being hijacked by overeager sales teams. This post is not a primer on ML technology; this post won’t pretend to give you an explanation of deep learning or any specific technology, because these concepts change frequently and are largely irrelevant to much of the decision making. Instead, this post will address how to assess the technology and determine if it will yield pragmatic business value.

Cyber-security is not all about cyber-thieves. It is about cyber-spies too. Mixed in among the spam, phishing messages and booby-trapped emails that land in your inbox might be the odd message crafted by hackers working for a government rather than a group of criminals. Unfortunately, those messages are not odd in any other way. They look like every other net-borne threat. That is because the creators of these malicious programs usually exploit the same software vulnerabilities as mainstream malware, they can travel via the same hijacked PCs and they prey on the same human frailties that make the more typical stuff so successful.

Despite fears about a slowdown in Silicon Valley, tech's unicorns are still hiring. In the past 30 days, Uber has posted 158 jobs in the Bay Area (and that doesn't include drivers). Dropbox has posted 113 jobs. Even Zenefits, which laid off 250 employees in February after its CEO and founder Parker Conrad abruptly quit, has posted 9 jobs. That's according to a new report from sales intelligence company DataFox. The report looked at job postings at the 100 top privately-held companies in Silicon Valley. Many of the companies are "unicorns," the term for startups valued at $1 billion or more. It culled the job posting data from careers site Indeed.com over the past 30 days. In total, more than 1,500 jobs in Silicon Valley have been posted at the companies.

I’ve spent the past month in a daze, trying to make sense of my own tasks and responsibilities while forcing myself to adhere to a system I came up with that simply doesn’t work. You can never anticipate how your “perfectly designed” task-management system can fail. It’s our own nature — we’re so sure of ourselves — that makes us think our idea will be the magic trick that solves all our problems. For me, this idea came around a month ago, on a rainy street in a cafe mostly filled with elderly ladies, looking at me disapprovingly while I did nothing but scroll on my phone for two hours solid.

The IT team at HRHCare has seen its workload rise in recent years, as the Beacon, N.Y.-based nonprofit has added facilities and expanded its services. Eric Brosius, the organization's vice president of technology services, wants to expand the staff so his team will be able to cope with the added responsibilities and tackle new technology initiatives. Specifically, Brosius says he wants to add another six or seven full-time people to his staff of 17 full-timers. His first hiring priority: two tech support folks. Then he wants to hire someone with architecture skills and experience working with software-as-a-service and cloud-based offerings to guide operations as the organization moves out of its own data center into a colocation site.

You're standing on the edge of a cliff, hundreds of feet above a snaking river. Your palms are sweaty. Your heart is beating fast. Someone tells you to jump, but everything in your body screams, "Don't do it!" Your brain is having a hard time overriding what your eyes are seeing in the goggles you wear on your face. "Jump!" you're told again. It's actually a harmless request, since this is virtual reality. Instead of a cliff's edge you're standing on a carpeted floor in a lounge at the Sundance Film Festival and you've been watching "The Climb," a brief film made by 8i, a startup that creates virtual reality, or VR, content.

The problem with having a microscopic robot propelled by a horde of tail-flailing bacteria is you never know where it's going to end up. The tiny, bio-robots, which amount to a chip coated with a "carpet" of flagellated bacteria, emerged from the primordial ooze of microrobotics research a few years ago as a concept for building microscopic devices and delivering medication at the cellular level. But as with any robot, the challenge for making them useful is bridging the gap from movement to automation. A team of engineers at Drexel University might have done just that, according to research recently published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics about using electric fields to direct the robots in a fluid environment.

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley tech companies have a gender equality problem. Of the companies that released diversity reports last year, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google ranked among the worst, reporting that between 13 percent and 18 percent of its tech jobs were held by women. At the top, as the most-inclusive of women in technology roles, were eBay (24 percent), Apple (22 percent) and Intel (20 percent) — still, all far below the target ratio. Though Silicon Valley has a lot of work to do to reach gender equality, other U.S. cities are faring better, according to a new report by financial software and data firm SmartAsset, which compiled a list of the top cities for women in technology.

Contactless payments may be all the rage these days, but you still have tap your smartphone, smartwatch or card on a terminal of some kind. And at busy times, this can mean standing in queues or hanging around for ages waiting for the restaurant bill to arrive. All that could be about to change. "Payments are vanishing inside apps," explains Dave Birch, a payments expert at Consult Hyperion. "That's where all the interesting stuff is going on."

MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells. Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it. "It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

If you are reading this article, chances are you have taken an Uber, are familiar with Upwork and maybe even sold something on Etsy. Business models that fall under the “gig economy” umbrella have been proven for business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer markets because they make it possible to crowdsource products and services from huge communities of people. Large online networks can also be some of the greatest sources of innovation. Led by the enterprise and government research and development verticals, this trend is growing rapidly because of a shift in focus from single-point services to the co-creation (collaborative innovation) model.

Rodney Sampson helps run Codestart, a 13-month program designed to teach young people from low-income backgrounds or communities about coding, finance and finding jobs. He was partly inspired by the lack of African Americans working in the tech industry - 1% of tech employees at Google, Facebook and other leading Silicon Valley companies are black. But when the program began last month, it wasn't difficulty with Java or finessing career strategies that threatened one student's progress. As part of the program, each student is provided with a living expense. When one of his students, who did not have a bank account, attempted to cash his check in a branch of the Atlanta Check Cashing Company, he was accused of attempting to submit a false or stolen money order.