Mental health clinicians typically use a patient’s answers to specific questions about lifestyle, mood, or past mental illness to diagnose depression. But in a September conference paper, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described a new artificial intelligence model they say can predict whether a person is depressed, based solely on raw text and audio from patient interviews, regardless of the topic of conversation.

Older Americans who don’t need in-home care or assisted living may still need help with everyday needs such as transportation, shopping, and technology. Many just need companionship. A Miami-based startup called Papa is aiming to fill this gap by providing a service that connects senior citizens with college students, an approach it calls “grandkids-on-demand.”

“People don’t always want to say they want companionship, even though their families say they do,” Papa founder Andrew Parker told TechCrunch. “But when a visit ends up being six hours, that’s evident what it’s for.”

Magnetic resonance imaging, the gold standard of modern diagnostic imaging, provides doctors with greater detail than other imaging techniques, such as X-ray or CT scans. But MRI scans take a long time—anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more. All the while, the patient must lie still inside a claustrophobia-inducing metal tube.

Children with autism seemingly improved their social skills after using a wearable device that helped them recognize emotions in people’s facial expressions, according to new research.

Your insurance agent may not have been replaced by a computer, but artificial intelligence (AI) may soon take over one of the most critical jobs in the insurance business: accident and disaster appraisal.

Tractable, a London-based startup, is using machine learning to train an AI system to conduct visual damage assessment with the goal of speeding up insurance payouts and access to governmental disaster relief funds.

What’s the future of personal transportation? The car industry is betting heavily that it involves driverless vehicles and ride-sharing. Major carmakers are pouring billions of dollars into autonomous vehicle research and development ($60 billion this year, reports Investor’s Business Daily), with General Motors planning to roll out its autonomous vehicles next year and Ford by 2021.

Big players in the aerospace and technology sectors are now major investors in a radically new approach to launching small payloads into outer space: space catapult.

SpinLaunch Inc., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014, recently announced it had raised $40 million, in part from venture capital firms affiliated with Airbus and Google.