British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton and American John Hopfield won the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence, with both sounding the alarm over the technology they helped bring to life.

Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation instrumental in training machines how to 'learn' by fine-tuning errors until they disappear.

Clinical trials are underway to explore microRNA as a skin cancer treatment, following Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvku's findings.