X A health worker performs a test after taking a nasal swab sample to test for COVID-19 in Gauhati, India, Friday, Aug. 7, 2020. As India hit another grim milestone in the coronavirus pandemic on Friday, crossing 2 million cases and more than 41,000 deaths, community health volunteers went on strike complaining they were ill-equipped to respond to the wave of infection in rural areas. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath) Coronavirus Global Updates: As the coronavirus pandemic enters its ninth month, over 18.94 million people have tested positive and over 11 lakh people have recovered from the disease on Friday. The African continent has been seeing a rapid surge in Covid-19 infections as the cases crossed the 1 million mark. Health experts warn the number of cases are higher than the official figures as the number of testing is still low in several African countries. ...
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — In the global race to build artificial intelligence, it was a missed opportunity. Jeff Hawkins, a Silicon Valley veteran who spent the last decade exploring the mysteries of the human brain, arranged a meeting with DeepMind, the world’s leading A.I. lab. Scientists at DeepMind, which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, want to build machines that can do anything the brain can do. Mr. Hawkins runs a little company with one goal: figure out how the brain works and then reverse engineer it. The meeting, set for April at DeepMind’s offices in London, never happened. DeepMind employs hundreds of A.I. researchers along with a team of seasoned neuroscientists. But when Mr. Hawkins chatted with Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of DeepMind, before his visit, they agreed that almost no one at the London lab would understand his work. Mr. Hawkins says that before the world can build artificial intelligence, it must explain human intellige...