After decades of lawsuits, public campaigns and painful struggles, Americans have finally done what once seemed impossible: Most of the country has quit smoking, saving millions of lives and leading to massive reductions in cancer.That is, unless those Americans are poor, uneducated or live in a rural area.Hidden among the steady declines in recent years is the stark reality that cigarettes are...

On the IBM-owned Weather.com site, the supercomputer is fielding questions about the Prius Prime like an expert.Watson is adding to his repertoire of cognitive ads today on Weather.com, with the announcement of the first one for the auto industry.Last October, the IBM-owned Weather Company launched the first such cognitive ad on its site, for Campbell Soup. In it, a site visitor could enter a f...

Freshly has raised a big funding round from a big name — the U.S. division of food and beverage giant Nestlé.Co-founder and CEO Michael Wystrach has pitched the startup as a way to get healthy, on-demand meals. That doesn’t mean you order from Freshly every time you want to eat — instead, you get one delivery of all your meals for the week. Then, when you’re hungry, you just heat one of th...

Technology originally developed for the factory might soon help humans with everyday life, too.One of the world’s most successful makers of industrial robots plans to turn its hand to creating automatons that help humans.Last summer, the German robotics firm Kuka—whose bright-orange robots already grace many a factory floor—was acquired by the Chinese household appliance company Midea Group...

What Are Algorithms ? Infographic : https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Rise-of-the-algorithm_v2.jpg[fururism]

Earlier this month the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Microsoft that revealed a new hover sensing system for mobile devices such a Surface tablet, future smartphone and HoloLens. Hover touch sensing involves sensing a non-touch or pre-touch interaction of a finger or stylus with a surface, such as a display. A finger or stylus need not physically contact...

With the exception of Chinese internet giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., which dominate their home market—where their Western rivals are restricted—none of the would-be challengers to the Google-Facebook “duopoly” even cracks a 3% share of global digital advertising.Google and Facebook together collect nearly half of global spending. Last year, the U.S...

US-based Neurala hopes the AI-powered surveillance technology will help protect endangered species.Artificial intelligence software installed into drones is to be used by US tech company Neurala to help protect endangered species from poachers. Working with the region’s Lingbergh Foundation, Neurala is currently helping operations in South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe and have had requests from...

Over the past few years, Amazon has repeatedly stated its ambitions to gain a foothold in the grocery market.The introduction of Amazon Fresh, Amazon Pantry and the prototype grocery store Amazon Go has made very clear that the e-commerce giant from Seattle is interested in the field. However, the $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, announced on Friday, is by far the clearest statement of...