The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete. To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory champions strengthen distinct groups of structures scattered throughout the brain. And then, they groove the connections that lash those groups together until the whole system works like a well-oiled machine. In short, memory champions are not born that way.

For the cognitively ambitious among us, there are always new debates to win, tests to ace, and feats of intellect to accomplish. And just as for the athletically gifted, the lure of performance-enhancing drugs is hard to resist. The question is, can drugs boost intellectual performance? New research shows that for tournament-level chess players, they can. In a series of experiments, researchers found that caffeine, the stimulant Ritalin and the stay-awake drug modafinil ever-so-slightly improved players' chances of winning a game against a computer program set to their skill level.

First they figured out how to play checkers and backgammon. Then they mastered chess, Go, "Jeopardy!" and even a few Atari video games. Now computers can challenge humans at the poker table -- and win. DeepStack, a software program developed at the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group, took on 33 professional poker players in more than 44,000 hands of Texas hold'em. Overall, the program won by a significantly higher margin than if it had simply folded in each round, according to a new study in Science.

In a feat reminiscent of the controversial victory by supercomputer'Deep Blue' over world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a computer program has managed to beat a string of professional poker players at the game. DeepStack, as it was called, defeated 10 out of 11 players who took part in a total of 3,000 games as part of a scientific study into artificial intelligence. The 11th player also lost, but by a margin that the researchers decided was not large enough to be statistically significant. This is not the first time a computer has won at poker. Libratus, a program developed by Carnegie Mellon University academics, won $1.76m (£1.4m) from professionals in January, for example.

An important shipment has finally arrived at the International Space Station, after a series of errors, delays and challenges. The SpaceX capsule smoothly arrived at the station the second time around as astronauts grabbed hold of the cargo ship, as the two of them floated somewhere over Australia. The capsule had been scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. But a GPS error stopped it from getting too close and the move had to be aborted. 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.

Nasa might have announced the biggest exoplanet find ever, but gamers are already gearing up find the next one. As scientists announced that they had found the "holy grail" of exoplanets – a solar system of seven worlds that could support life – a game announced that it was beginning the search for the next one. Massively multiplayer online game EVE Online has announced that it will be launching a search for planets orbiting our solar system, looking through the huge amount of data and images captured of other planets in our galaxy. 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.

Nasa might soon launch our best ever chance of meeting aliens. The space agency is putting together plans to send a lander to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons and perhaps the most likely place to harbour alien life anywhere near us. But first they will have to work out how they can actually land on a surface about which they know next to nothing. The agency started seriously exploring that possibility by commissioning a report on the value of sending a lander onto the icy surface of the moon. That report has now arrived and Nasa is looking to explore its findings with the scientific community.

The British Navy has fired its first torpedo using a radical new'brain' fitted to a nuclear submarine. The Royal Navy's latest and most advanced Astute class submarine, Artful, used the Common Combat System for the first time. It is the first to use this new technology which is now being retrofitted to earlier Astute class submarines. The new system, provided by VMware, Dell and Aish, processes information from submarine sensors to enable crew members to make important command decisions. It was used during the test to interpret sonar readings and then attack a moving target with a practice weapon.

They are the ultimate symbol of military might, capable of providing a dominant presence in almost any region of the world where there is a nearby ocean. But as technology has advanced, the hulking weaponry and armour of warships that have ruled the waves are having to change and adapt to these high-tech times. From drones to unmanned boats and laser weapons, experts at How It Works Magazine have revealed what fleets of the future will look like. From drones to unmanned boats and laser weapons, experts at How It Works Magazine have revealed what fleets of the future will look like. This artist's impression shows a selection of some of the features that could make their way onto warships over the next decade The Royal Navy in the UK has been challenging young British scientists and engineers to design the fleet of the future.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they've managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly. The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines. In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom's female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other.