Autonomous cars are a chance to reinvent the steering wheel. Because the vehicles themselves do all the driving, cars are no longer bound by such basic conventions as "keep a human facing forward at all times" and "don't try to climb over boulders like a spider." As a grand showcase for the new possibilities of autonomous cars, Honda plotted a seven-stage road trip roughly following that path of humanity's great migration from a species to the edge of the world. The auto company used miniature models for this conceptual video, but the hope is the same principles could be applied to human-sized autonomous vehicles of the future. Honda's route goes from Nairobi, Kenya to Manaus, Brazil, and new vehicles trace individual legs of that journey.

In its time the Google Doodle has celebrated mathematicians such as John Venn, George Boole and Hertha Marks Ayrton - as well codebreaker Alan Turing, the 100th anniversary of whose birth was 23 June 2012. Now it is the turn of Claude Shannon, who worked with Turing on Allied codebreaking during the Second World War - not at Bletchley Park, but in Washington, where Turing had been seconded in 1943 to bring the US up to speed with British cryptanalytic developments. Shannon was four years younger, 26 to Turing's 30. Although Shannon's war-time work was crucial to the Allied effort, he did devote some of his energies to more frivolous projects. In the 1070s, Shannon built the world's first juggling robot, using an Erector Set (the equivalent of a Mecanno set).

Even with bottled oxygen and elite training, there are underwater locations that lie well beyond our physical capabilities. But via haptic feedback technology and artificial intelligence, Stanford University's humanoid diving robot is now putting the ocean's depths within human reach. In its maiden expedition, the OceanOne droid has just scoured an untouched shipwreck off the coast of France and returned with a delicate, 17th century vase in its grip. Researchers are now eyeing future voyages to coral reefs, oil rigs and underwater disaster zones. With our deep sea diving capabilities only taking us so far, we have long sought to send robots down below to do the investigating for us.

Robots and artificial intelligence have opened doors in the fields of manufacturing and machine learning, but now they have gone where few expected them to go: deep sea diving. Stanford University professor of computer science Oussama Khatib developed his new deep ocean avatar in response to a need to dive deeper than humans can comfortably go. The robot he created, named OceanOne, is so revolutionary that it could change the field of deep sea diving, forever. "OceanOne will be your avatar," Dr. Khatib said in a Stanford press release. "The intent here is to have a human diving virtually, to put the human out of harm's way. Having a machine that has human characteristics that can project the human diver's embodiment at depth is going to be amazing."

When Cheetah Mobile CEO Sheng Fu went to the US for the first time five years ago, he asked himself, "Why is that Chinese companies work so hard but the most important inventions and new technologies come out of America?" He concluded that the difference between China and the US is that Americans think bigger and dream bigger. The global service robotics market is set to boom, and the second half of 2015 should usher the first wave of these new helpers. Here are seven devices leading the charge. This week in Beijing, Fu announced his company is going to launch itself into AI and deep learning, create a dual headquarters in Beijing and Silicon Valley, and release robots for consumers on a global scale. No one is going to accuse Fu of not thinking big enough.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials Thursday in the French city of Marseille after a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. According to Stanford, the concept for Ocean One was born from the need to study coral reefs deep in the Red Sea, far below the comfortable range of human divers.

Meet OceanOne, a robot avatar that lets humans explore deep under the Ocean's surface, without any of the dangers or time limits associated with diving. While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments. OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet.

The sea has been called the final frontier, as its unexplored depths hold mysteries that humans have not been able to reach – until now. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. And the maiden voyage of this droid proved bountiful as it pulled treasure from the'La Lune', King Louis XIV's vessel which has been sitting 328 feet below the surface since 1664. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of miles deeper than any human ever has Louis XIV's ship La Lune was wrecked off Toulon in November 1664.

This gif shows a spinning 3D view of one person's cerebral cortex. The color of each voxel indicates its semantic selectivity, or which category of words it is selective for. For example, green voxels are mostly selective for visual and tactile concepts, while red voxels are mostly selective social concepts. White lines show the outlines of known functional brain regions. It's like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin typically write a public letter every year to reflect on the company's accomplishments and goals. This year, however, Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai penned the annual note for the first time. Pichai was made CEO of Google after a recent reorganization made the company a subsidiary of umbrella organization Alphabet. Pichai's note delves into Google's accomplishments around search, YouTube, artificial intelligence, and more. He writes that Google will continue to push heavily into the development of artificial intelligence as a means of improving and advancing its most important products.