A Singapore-based company has launched a new Android app that helps students and adults learn Mandarin on the go. Dubbed iQ-Hub, the app delivers Mandarin lessons based on a proprietary speech recognition technology that assesses your pronunciation through built-in analytics. Learners are offered immediate feedback on their speech accuracy, while parents and teachers can track a student's progress in each lesson. Besides tuition centres and new residents, the company is targeting airlines and the service industry, where frontline staff may be required to learn Mandarin to converse with the growing number of Chinese tourists in Singapore. The app comes with S$0.99 lesson packages aligned with the Singapore Ministry of Education's primary school Chinese curriculum.

It's a hot late-spring Friday on a cactus-studded cattle ranch in Mexico, and nothing is happening. Nothing, in fact, has been happening for going on a week now, and it's starting to get tedious. Ordinarily, the group of scientists, engineers, and students who have gathered here might have enjoyed a respite from their otherwise crazy schedules. But they didn't come here to catch up on their reading, play the guitar, or take long, leisurely walks. They came here to work. Their goal is to field-test one of the most intelligent and agile underwater robots ever crafted, a possible predecessor of a machine that might someday swim the vast, ice-crusted ocean of Jupiter's mysterious moon Europa. Called DEPTHX, for DEep Phreatic THermal eXplorer, the 1.3-metric-ton machine can maneuver freely, draw detailed, three-dimensional maps of its watery surroundings, and collect solid and liquid biological samples as it senses changing conditions in its environment. Most important, it does all that without any guidance from human operators. Such autonomy would be essential if the robot ever does swim on Europa--which may be warm enough, thanks to geothermal activity, to have given rise to some sort of life. Human control of a robot sub that far away isn't an option: radio waves don't effectively penetrate water. Even if they did, a round-trip radio signal would take 2 hours or more, making remote control unlikely. But today, on this sweltering retreat near the Gulf Coast of Mexico, with cicadas buzzing and a hazy sun beating down, Europa seems a long way off.

Out on the rocky horizon, the robot has stopped dead in its tracks. "Uh, Dave, I got a big problem out here," a voice crackles over the radio. "OK," David Wettergreen replies carefully, peering off in the direction of the machine. "Big" turns out to be a new part for the robot that doesn't quite fit and so prevents the robot's cameras--its eyes--from turning properly. Back at the laboratory, this would be a quick fix, but the robot, Wettergreen, three geologists, two software engineers, two sociologists, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a biologist are all out in the middle of Chile's vast Atacama Desert, [see map] many hours' drive from civilization. As he strides off to investigate, you get the sense Wettergreen's enjoying himself. For the better part of an hour, he and two colleagues will wrestle with the aberrant part [see photo, " All in a Day's Work"].

Millions of people around the world are tackling one of the hardest problems in computer science--without even knowing it. The logic game Sudoku is a miniature version of a longstanding mathematical challenge, and it entices both puzzlers, who see it as an enjoyable plaything, and researchers, who see it as a laboratory for algorithm design. Sudoku has become a worldwide puzzle craze within the past year. Previously known primarily in Japan, it now graces newspapers, Web sites, and best-selling books in dozens of countries. A puzzle consists of a 9-by-9 grid made up of nine 3-by-3 subgrids.

Hollywood has always been interested in science--and has employed consultants to get it right throughout most of its history. It's a relationship, though, that has been controversial at times, and in this article we look at how technical advisors resolve the tension between accurate science and dramatic storytelling. As an investigator and science planning engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Kevin Grazier, Ph.D., spends a lot of time with his head in the stars. Most days, he's concerned with the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. But every now and then he wrestles with the challenges of a more far-out world: "Battlestar Galactica"--a contemporary remake of the classic 1979 television show.

We recently ran across Alelo (www.alelo.com), The company's very engaging, interactive 3D role playing games teach languages like Arabic and Pashto to troops being deployed to the Middle East. Using speech recognition and other technology, the titles teach foreign languages to players as they go through the game in simulated environments like Iraq. We spoke with Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, CEO of Alelo, about the firm's technology and plans. Ben Kuo: Tell us a little bit about Alelo, and what the company and product does?

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots." The key reasons cited by humans for dissatisfaction with robots are: • "That infernal humming." PART II Our surveys reveal that extramarital infidelity is the "tipping point" for the deterioration of human-robot relationships. As noted elsewhere in roboliterature (see "Russian Robot Wives Date Cyclotrons," National Enquirer, March 2047), a notorious flaw of robots' artificial intelligence technology is an underdeveloped moral sense. Over 75 percent of human-robot marital spats involve rampant robot promiscuity.

TELLING Hiroshi Ishiguro apart from his robotic replica can be tough. The professor's silicon-brainchild, cast from plastic and plaster moulds of his face and body and implanted with some of his sweeping black locks, is as realistic as a Madame Tussaud's waxworks model - down to the frown on his broad forehead. The android, Geminoid H1-1, mimics its master's posture, lip movements and facial gestures - even his fidgety fingers and feet. It blinks, seems to breathe and sounds, for all the world, like its human counterpart. Remote-controlled Geminoid stands in when the busy professor doesn't have time to lecture and presents a compelling scripted talk.

IT USED to be that you would go into a dark tent where an old woman would gaze into a ball and tell you about the dark handsome stranger in your future. In the 21st century, it seems, the tent is a rather eccentrically decorated office in the suburbs of Boston; the old woman, a professorial chap in a suit; and the handsome stranger, a network of hyper-intelligent computers that will take over the world. It is hard not to think Arnold Schwarzenegger while talking to futurist Ray Kurzweil. This is not because he looks like Arnie (he is pretty much the physical opposite), but because he keeps saying things that sound like the plot of the movie Terminator. Nanobots, self-aware computers and human cyborgs litter his conversations.

This observation serves as the core of what he and other world leaders are terming "the Fourth Industrial Revolution," the theme of this year's wintry summit in Switzerland. Building on the German government's "Industry 4.0," the current national strategy for "smart" factories integrating physical manufacturing with the Internet of Things, Schwab and the WEF argue that the coming years--likely littered with 3-D printers and designer babies--will mark the beginning of a revolution unlike any we have ever experienced, unique for its scale, scope, and complexity. They cite the convergence of multiple sectors of technology and industry (artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, autonomous vehicles, to name a scant few) as evidence that humans are entering a new era of profound, exponentially increasing possibility and risk.