Emma Morano passed away last April. At 117 years old, the Italian woman was the oldest known living human being.

Super- centenarians, such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who famously lived to be 122 years old, continue to fascinate scientists and have led them to wonder just how long humans can live. A study published in Nature last October concluded that the upper limit of human age is peaking at around 115 years.

Now, however, a new study in Nature by McGill University biologists Bryan G. Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi comes to a starkly different conclusion. By analyzing the lifespan of the longest-living individuals from the USA, the UK, France and Japan for each year since 1968, Hekimi and Hughes found no evidence for such a limit, and if such a maximum exists, it has yet to be reached or identified, Hekimi says.

Far into the foreseeable future

"We just don't know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future," Hekimi says. Many people are aware of what has happened with average lifespans. In 1920, for example, the average newborn Canadian could expect to live 60 years; a Canadian born in 1980 could expect 76 years, and today, life expectancy has jumped to 82 years. Maximum lifespan seems to follow the same trend.

It's impossible to predict what future lifespans in humans might look like, Hekimi says. Some scientists argue that technology, medical interventions, and improvements in living conditions could all push back the upper limit.

"It's hard to guess," Hekimi adds. "Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy."

Haptik opens up AI assistant technology that powers its chatbots

Haptik, an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant service, has open sourced its proprietary Named Entity Recognition system that powers the chatbots behind Haptik Android and iOS apps at Chatbot Summit in Berlin.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a widely used technology component by any product that uses machine learning to understand the textual datasets it is built on.

While NER technology is a common feature in many social media, news apps, ad-tech, search engines and analytics platforms, it has been largely unexplored in the chatbots domain. Haptik has now given it a shot.

“Developer tools and open source technology play a key part in the evolution of any platform,“ said Aakrit Vaish, CEO of Haptik. “The Haptik Chatbot NER is our way of contributing to the growth of chatbot development and advancing the overall paradigm shift,“ Vaish said during his productUX keynote at the summit.

Developers can use the chatbot NER to build and enhance the intelligence of chatbots targeted at domains like personal assistance, e-commerce, insurance, healthcare and fitness, and can therefore skip the years of data mining.

There are predefined entities like restaurant names, cuisine, city list, time and date, which can be used out of the box in the Haptik chat bot NER after in stallation. One can create custom entities or edit the current ones by just adding data using a given template. Haptik raised $11.2 million last year from Times Internet, part of Times Group, which publishes The Economic Times.

Boeing set to start testing self-flying planes

It says it wants to develop autonomous aircraft, which would be capable of navigating themselves without any input from a human pilot.

Planes can already take off, cruise and land with minimal human assistance, but Boeing wants to go a step further.

It wants artificial intelligence to start making some of the decisions pilots are trusted to make.

"When I look at the future I see a need for you know 41,000 commercial jet airplanes over the course of the next 20 years,” said Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s vice president of product development, according to Reuters.

“And that means we're going to need something like six hundred and seventeen thousand more pilots. That's a lot of pilots.

“So one of the ways that may be solved is by having some type of autonomous behaviour and that could be anything from taking instead of five pilots on a long haul flight down to three or two, taking two pilots down to one in a freight situation, or in some cases going from one to none.”

The company plans to test self-flying technology in a cockpit simulator this summer, before using it on a real plane next year.

Airbus is currently working on autonomous flying cars, and will test prototype single-seater flying taxis before the end of the year, ahead of a wider rollout in 2021.

However, while it envisages that its cars would form part of a wider ride-hailing system, like Uber, Boeing appears to be aiming to carry lots of passengers at once.