Spike activity 05-06-2015

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Fusion has an oddly fascinating piece on the AI of dick pic detection which turns out to be a surprisingly hard problem (matron).

Uber poaches 40 people from Carnegie Mellon’s robotics researcher community wanting to boost their autonomous car technology according to the Market Watch.

Brain Metrics has an excellent primer on a key neuroscience technique: What does MEG measure?

There’s an excellent in-depth article in The New York Times on pregnancy and depression by writer Andrew Solomon.

MIT Tech Review covers AI’s first cheating scandal. Apparently, some of the puny humans it was trying to wipe out were already critically ill to start with.

Interesting piece in The Guardian. “My son has autism. That’s why I won’t be finishing Norman Doidge’s book.” My condolences for starting.

BBC Future has a fascinating piece on highly multilingual people.

There’s a good profile of behavioural economist Richard Thaler in Bloomberg.

Discover has a fascinating short piece on ‘phantom eye syndrome’ – like a phantom limb limb after eye removal: “symptoms included pain, visual sensations, or the impression of actually seeing with the missing eye”.

This looks excellent: trailer for an upcoming six-part documentary series on neuroscience called The Brain. Hosted by neuroscientist David Eagleman.

Essential Forbes piece on the almost approved ‘female Viagra’ flibanserin: 0.7 extra sexually satisfying events per month, no effect on sexual desire, “very significant side effects” and promoted by an astroturfed ‘equality’ campaign. Progress people!