Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. The kit will include a high-end commercial model car, a laptop, a GPS receiver, a USB controller and a camera. The aim is to encourage different research teams to develop autonomous racers using the same equipment, which will then race against one another at the 2008 World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong. Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive.

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim. But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

A futuristic world, complete with autonomous household companions, android medics and even robot entertainers, will greet visitors to the Prototype Robot Exhibition in Japan from 9 June, 2005. The exhibition forms part of the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, which runs from 25 May to 25 September. Several utility robots, including autonomous garbage collectors, vacuum cleaners and security guards, are already patrolling the wider Expo. But the Prototype Robot Exhibition gives academics and commercial researchers a chance to showcase a more distant vision of robot utopia. The exhibition features a mock-ups of homes, streets and workplaces from the year 2020 and more than sixty different types of robot will be exhibited.

The recent launch of Pleo, a dinosaur "life form" from Emeryville, Calif.-based Ugobe is one of the more high-profile releases of a companion robot to date. And its $350 price may be just low enough to lure a mainstream audience. In fact, suggests a group of industry insiders, Pleo is likely to be a jumping-off point for ubiquitous, inexpensive robots with capabilities far beyond what is possible today, including offering people a level of empathetic companionship that has so far been strictly the province of science fiction. And while robots like Pleo may be seen--in spite of their makers' marketing plans--as toys, the very meaning of the term "toys" could be up for a major reinterpretation. "Pretty soon, they're not going to be called'toys' anymore, or they'll redefine what'toys' mean," said David Hanson, the founder and chief scientist of Hanson Robotics.

Judges in England were fooled into thinking the computer program they were conversing with was a human on Saturday -- making it the first to pass the 65-year-old Turing Test. "Eugene Goostman" is not a 13-year-old boy, but 33 percent of the people who partook in five minute keyboard conversations with the computer program at the Royal Society in London thought it was, according to The University of Reading, which organized the test. The Turing Test is based on "the father of modern computer science" Alan Turing's question, "Can Machines Think?" If a computer is mistaken for a human by more than 30 percent of judges, it passes the test, but no computer has accomplished the feat -- until now. "We didn't expect to break the barrier of the 30 percent, let alone the 33," John Denning, the project's director, told NBC News.

An artist's impression of the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, which aims to be the first to land on a comet. Several research groups, including a team led by geneticist Erika Sasaki and stem-cell biologist Hideyuki Okano at Keio University in Tokyo, hope to create transgenic primates with immune-system deficiencies or brain disorders. This could raise ethical concerns, but might bring us closer to therapies that are relevant to humans (mice can be poor models for such disorders). The work will probably make use of a gene-editing method called CRISPR, which saw rapid take-up last year. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft could become the first mission to land a probe on a comet.

Pilot Matt Standridge will compete in the Cybathlon using an exoskeleton from the University of Houston's Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory designed to help people with paraplegia to walk. Vance Bergeron was once an amateur cyclist who rode 7,000 kilometres per year -- much of it on steep climbs in the Alps. But in February 2013, as the 50-year-old chemical engineer was biking to work at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyons, France, he was hit by a car. The impact sent him flying through the air and onto his head, breaking his neck. When he woke, he learnt that he would never again move his legs on his own, and would have only limited use of his arms.

Fraud punished A Parkinson's disease researcher in Australia pleaded guilty to research fraud and was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence by a court in Brisbane on 31 March. Bruce Murdoch, formerly of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, was found to have falsified results published in the European Journal of Neurology in 2011; three of his papers have been retracted. In a statement to the blog Retraction Watch, University of Queensland vice-chancellor Peter Høj said that the university had reimbursed around Aus$175,000 (US$132,000) to funding bodies associated with Murdoch's work. Ice wall to stem Fukushima leak The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) on 31 March began freezing the soil surrounding reactors 1 to 4 of the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A refrigeration system (pictured) is creating a 30-metre deep, 1.5-kilometre-long wall of frozen ground that aims to stop groundwater from flowing under the plant and carrying radioactive isotopes into the sea.

As the popularity of self-driving cars increases, so do the concerns. Last month, China banned tests of autonomous vehicles on public roads. And investigations continue into the death of Joshua Brown, who was killed when his Tesla car on autopilot ploughed into the side of an articulated truck in Florida. His car used visible-light cameras to image the road and computers to evaluate the situation. But according to Tesla, the white truck merged with the bright Florida sky and was not recognized.

Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Fridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, phones and smart devices are all now equipped with communicating sensors. In ten years, 150 billion'things' will connect with each other and with billions of people. The'Internet of Things' will generate data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months, as is the case now.