This week in tech, everyone wants to find out how well machines can guess their age (and gender!). Also, some amazing things that can be done with DNA, and the latest endeavour from Elon Musk and Tesla.

Microsoft’s machine learning demo goes viral

The How old do I look? website, which detects faces in photographs and then guesses the gender and age of those faces, went viral last week.

It started out as a simple demo that was going to be used during a keynote at Microsoft’s Build2015 conference for programmers. In a blog post written by the two software engineers who created the app, they confess that they were “expecting perhaps 50 users for a test”. They got over 35,000. And the popularity hasn’t died down yet.

If you want to know more about the code that went into it all, the tutorial is over here.

Look what other people can do with your DNA

A clever anti-litter campaign in Hong Kong aims to shame people into disposing of trash properly by posting photos of the culprits.

The images are generated from the DNA sampled from garbage picked up off the ground. The images aren’t perfect representations of the litterers, but instead provide a more general likeness, something along the line of a family resemblance.

The process of DNA phenotyping, where genetic information is used to predict a person’s appearance, was also used by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who created sculptures of faces based on DNA she collected from public spaces in New York City.

Based on information from the DNA, Dewey-Hagborg wrote a computer program to “take all these values which code for physical genetic traits and parameterizes a 3-D model of a face to represent them.”

She’s able to determine gender and ancestry fairly accurately, as well as hair and eye colour. But like the portraits of Hong Kong litterers, her sculptures are not identical to their unwitting models.

Makes you wonder what else can be done with your DNA.

Tesla’s batteries for the home

I seem to keep writing about Elon Musk and Tesla, but that’s because the man and the company are doing so many interesting and disruptive things.

The latest initiative is Tesla Energy, which leverages the battery technology used by the car company to help power homes and businesses. Powerwall is a wall-mounted battery system that can integrate with an existing electrical system, including those that are tapped into solar panels.

It comes in a 10 kWh model for US$3,500 and a smaller 7 kWh model for $3,000. (For context, one kWh can power a 40-watt incandescent light bulb for 25 hours.)

While it’s unlikely that the Powerwall will be available, or certified, for use in Canada right away, the existence of the technology and the service sets the stage for the future.

Because in addition to the home-based option, Tesla Energy also has Powerpack, which is an “infinitely scalable” system that can even be used by utilities and can scale up to 10 MWh.

Just watch Tony Stark, I mean Elon Musk, make the Powerwall announcement.