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"A new algorithm, however, is attempting to identify specific syndromes much sooner by screening photos for characteristic facial features associated with specific genetic conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Progeria, and Fragile X syndrome."

"Brain scans, however, are quite telling, especially when analyzed with an algorithm, Brent and his colleagues discovered. "We're trying to figure out what's going on in somebody's brain when they're thinking about suicide," says Brent.  These scans, taken using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, show that strong words such as 'death,' 'trouble,' 'carefree,' and 'praise,' trigger different patterns of brain activity in people who are suicidal, compared with people who are not. That means that people at risk of suicide think about those concepts differently than everyone else-evidenced by the levels and patterns of brain activity, or neural signatures."

"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."

"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."