Last month, Unknown Country reported the views of technology heavyweights such as Elon Musk that artificial intelligence could be the most significant threat to the future of mankind. Now Stephen Hawking has added his voice to their ever-increasing concerns regarding the outcome of creating intelligent machines.

“The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have proved very useful, " said Hawking. but the I think the development of true artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

“Humans limited by slow biological evolution cannot compete and will be superseded.”
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Sometimes we hate mice, but sometimes we love them.

You can now own a mouse with an immune system that’s identical to yours. Why would you want to do that? So that drugs and medical therapies can be tested on the mouse first, before they’re used on you. Some researchers call them "avatars, like the virtual characters in movies and video games.

While these "mouse models" are mostly used for general research, companies are beginning to personalize them to help with an individual patient’s medical treatment.

One problem: This avatar can cost tens of thousands of dollars and it won’t be covered by insurance.
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10,000 tourists who stayed in cabins at Yosemite National Park recently might have been exposed to the deadly mouse-borne Hanta Virus. So far , Hanta has made 6 of the tourists ill. Hanta Virus is caused by inhaling the dried feces of infected mice. It is also carried by prairie dogs.

The Park Service is frantically writing and emailing the people who stayed in those cabins this summer, telling them to check in with their doctors.
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Think YOU’VE got mice? MILLIONS of field mice are overrunning farms in Germany, gobbling up crops and reducing yields by as much as 50%. It’s the worst mouse plague in over 30 years.

Getting birds of prey to hunt the mice didn’t help. Der Spiegel quotes farm spokesman Reinhard Kopp as saying, "The birds got so fat from eating all the mice that they almost couldn’t fly any more, but they still couldn’t keep up."

Now farmers want to be allowed to use a rat poison called Ratron, which has been banned since 2008, after it killed wild geese. Should they look for a pied piper?
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