The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself.
Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.
If you're more into cooking, it is something we already do with various particles - and with multiple beams to minimize damage to surrouding tissues (google for gamma knife)
It's a good thing Peter Norvig sees an advance. It'd be much better when that feeling is shared by the scientific community.
Real advances can be made, and there is indeed a web 2.0 filter here - much effort being spent on barely interesting things. The human race can do so much better.
But curing cancer, ai, whole brain emulation etc. are topics which will require a long sustained effort - if only because we are constrained by our technology!
It's not a matter of capital - these problems just can't be correctly addressed with our current technology.
It's a good thing if we are making steps in the right directions, but it's very unlikely these problems will be solved very soon, therefore my interest in news about such problems is quite low, even with a deep interest in them!
So I guess it's just natural that other readers find such things even less newsworthy :-(
Anyway, I'm not offended by gmail news, just wanted to get some ultrasound and some ai in there and put things in context.