NASA recently launched Mars rovers that students had designed, sending them into space for about 20 minutes to see how they would perform high above Earth's surface. The students working on the robotics project were from Virginia Tech and the University of Central Florida, NASA reported, and they used 3D printing to build the prototypes that could be used to explore Mars but would store easily, with features like folding or collapsible parts. The rocket last week sent them up 154 miles, then brought them down with a parachute into the Atlantic Ocean. "Part of the problem we keep running into is packaging," NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh said in the space agency's statement. "We have to carry a lot of payloads -- rovers, habitats and such. We want to package them on top of the launch vehicle. Rovers have classically been bulky and heavy. The students helped design 18 of the more lightweight and less cumbersome Mars rovers, four of which were built and launched on the NASA rocket. "I have always thought of mass to be the limiting factor in space travel," Virginia Tech student Alex Matta, said in the NASA statement. "Participation in this project led me to realize that minimizing volume of the cargo is important as well." The students offered a fresh set of eyes and minds to the effort. Students watch a NASA rocket carry their Mars rover designs into space. NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh shows off one of the student-made Mars rover designs that recently launched into space. "They come up with these ideas that I cannot come up with," Samareh said. "They have a different mentality.

A large body of water separated the present-day North American continent into two halves during most of the late Cretaceous Period, between 95 and 66 million years ago, and because of the seaway linking the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, land animals on one side could not make it to the other, and would therefore evolve independently. One such genus of animals, trapped on the western half, was the horned dinosaur, whose remains have been found in western North America, as well as Asia. However, the discovery of a tooth in Mississippi provides evidence that horned dinosaurs were present in eastern North America as well. The fossil, dated to between 66 and 68 million years ago, is from a dinosaur closely related to Triceratops, the most well-known genus of horned dinosaurs. The find also suggests that there could have existed some land connection between the two land masses thought to be completely separate at the time. This is a tooth of a ceratopsid horned dinosaur from Mississippi.

Astronauts are having to climb into space to fix a computer in an emergency move. Two inhabitants of the International Space Station (ISS) will have to venture out on a spacewalk to repair a computer part – a data relay box – that broke over the weekend. The broken computer means that the lab is floating over the Earth relying only on its second computer, potentially putting the astronauts on board at risk. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Chinese government plans to find, catch and land on an asteroid – before mining and even living on it. Beijing hopes to be able to take the precious and rare materials that are thought to be inside of many asteroids by catching one as early as 2020, according to officials from China's space programme. The country will launch its first spacecraft over the next three years or so, chief commander and designer of China's lunar exploration program Ye Pijian told state media. But the project will be much broader than that – eventually using the asteroids as the base for a Chinese space station. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

In 2014, Google fired a shot heard all the way to Detroit. Google's newest driverless car prototype had no steering wheel and no brakes. The message was clear: Cars of the future will be born fully autonomous, with no human driver needed or desired. Even more jarring, rather than retrofit a Prius or a Lexus as Google did to build its previous two generations of driverless cars, the company custom-built the body of its youngest driverless car with a team of subcontracted automotive suppliers. Best of all, the car emerged from the womb already an expert driver, with roughly 700,000 miles of experience culled from the brains of previous prototypes. Now that Google's self-driving cars have had another few more years of practice, the fleet's collective drive-time equals more than 1.3 million miles, the equivalent of a human logging 15,000 miles a year behind the wheel for 90 years. In response, car companies are pouring billions of dollars into software development and the epicenter of automotive innovation has moved from Detroit to Silicon Valley.

The main task in oil and gas exploration is to gain an understanding of the distribution and nature of rocks and fluids in the subsurface. Well logs are records of petro-physical data acquired along a borehole, providing direct information about what is in the subsurface. The data collected by logging wells can have significant economic consequences, due to the costs inherent to drilling wells, and the potential return of oil deposits. In this paper, we describe preliminary work aimed at building a general framework for well log prediction. First, we perform a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the gaps in the neutron porosity logs of more than a thousand wells in the North Sea. Then, we generate artificial gaps in the neutron logs that reflect the statistics collected before. Finally, we compare Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, and three algorithms of Linear Regression in the prediction of missing gaps on a well-by-well basis.

A helicopter pelts Guam's trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the U.S. Midwest. In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins. "Critters are smart -- they survive," said biologist Rob "Goose" Gosnell, head of U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. "Trying to outsmart them is hard to do." Invasive species are plants and animals that thrive in areas where they don't naturally live, usually brought there by humans, either accidentally or intentionally.

A new underwater robot is targeting the stunning but dangerous lionfish, which has spread over the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and up the U.S. East Coast as far north as New York's Long Island, with its venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. The robot is the creation of Colin Angle, chief executive officer of IRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new nonprofit to turn automation into environmental tools.

Dolphins are known to be highly intelligent creatures, and have even been found to construct'sentences' from patterns of clicks and pulses to communicate with each other. And, using artificial intelligence, researchers are now hoping to figure out what they're talking about. Researchers in Sweden are set to begin creating a dolphin-language dictionary using technology from language-analysis startup Gavagai AB – and, it could one day allow humans to communicate with the animals. The program launched by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Gavagai AB plan to monitor captive bottlenose dolphins at a wildlife park. The language-analysis software has already proven capable in 40 human languages. And, it's hoped that the artificial intelligence system can similarly decode the dolphins' 'dictionary.'

"Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind," wrote the playwright John Milton in 1634. But, nearly 400 years later, technological advances in machines that can read our thoughts mean the privacy of our brain is under threat. Now two biomedical ethicists are calling for the creation of new human rights laws to ensure people are protected, including "the right to cognitive liberty" and "the right to mental integrity". Scientists have already developed devices capable of telling whether people are politically right-wing or left-wing. In one experiment, researchers were able to read people's minds to tell with 70 per cent accuracy whether they planned to add or subtract two numbers.