Lab notes: the future has three parents and a DeepMind

The pace of AI advances is speeding up. It seems like every week we hear of another breakthrough, and so this week's big news is that Google's DeepMind has taken another step closer to artificial general intelligence with a program that can learn like a human. And if that weren't enough of a mind-flip, a study out this week that suggests it's possible to use brain scans to spot the difference between people who committed crimes on purpose and those who broke the law through sheer reckless behaviour. All this just goes to show that humans have come a long way, whether it's through adapting physiologically to thrive in particular climates or developing IVF techniques to prevent incurable genetic diseases being inherited by children. The latter development is an extremely exciting one, and this week the first UK clinic was granted a licence to use the three-person baby fertility technique - doctors hope to offer the procedure to the first UK patients from this summer.