AI used to craft your perfect beer
A Devonshire-based brewery start-up is using artificial intelligence to brew its beers. The Intelligentx Brewing Company uses reinforcement learning to help create its beverages. Customers can feed their thoughts on what they are drinking directly back to the bot, via Facebook Messenger. The updated information is then used by the algorithm to tweak each subsequent batch of beer.

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Google Daydream Labs , Creating VR in VR Daydream Labs lets developers animate and build virtual reality not on a flat computer screen, but for the first time inside VR itself. They can interact, socialize, offer feedback, and use hand controllers as their virtual creations rise up around them.

Intelligentx Brewing Company , The First A.I. Brewmaster Humans have brewed beer for millennia. Intelligentx Brewing Company thinks artificial intelligence should take a shot. Its machine-learning algorithm reads beer recipes like any other brewmaster. But it also learns from you. After drinking one of the brewery’s four beer styles, you tell a bot on Facebook Messenger what you like, don’t like, or want more of, and the A.I. uses your comments to brew the next batch. More data, better brew.

WhatsApp Encryption , 1 Billion Safer People In April 2016, more than 1 billion cellphone users gained the ability to outsmart the NSA or any third-party snoop when Open Whisper Systems released its WhatsApp end-to-end encryption protocols. Made for voice calls and texting (including photos, videos, and files), users verify their communication is encrypted by either scanning a machine-readable QR code or comparing a 60-digit code with their fellow security-obsessed communicant.

Numinous Games’ That Dragon, Cancer : A Game That Will Break Your Heart When game developer Ryan Green’s son, Joel, was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 1, Green turned to his medium to work through it. The result is a soul-twisting video game that lets players experience the ups and downs the Greens went through during Joel’s four-year battle—the challenge of comforting a child in pain, the joy of story time, and the grief of dealing with his death. “My favorite moments are the moments where you can be with Joel,” says Green. “To play with him, hear him breathe, or hear him laugh, those moments I like the most.”

Microsoft and Univ. of Washington DNA Storage: The Densest Data Instead of server farms, the entire Internet may one day be the size of a shoe box. That’s what researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington proved in July, when they encoded 200 megabytes of digital files into the building blocks of DNA—breaking the previous 20-megabyte record. They did it using a type of enzyme called polymerase, which makes copies of DNA in a programmable way and allows any part of the DNA string to be read.

Snapchat Lenses : AR’s Big Moment It wasn’t Pokémon Go. It was Snapchat’s Lenses—object recognition and real-time special effects that let you change your on-screen eye color, superimpose faces, wear animal “masks,” and place scenes around an image.

Read about the other Best of What’s New winners from the November/December 2016 issue of Popular Science.