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 voice-operated computer assistant is set to be used in space for the first time on Monday – its operators hope it proves more reliable than "HAL", the treacherous speaking computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Called Clarissa, the program will initially talk astronauts on the International Space Station through tests of onboard water supplies. But its developers hope it will eventually be used for all computer-related work on the station. Clarissa was designed with input from astronauts. They said it was difficult to perform the 12,000 procedures necessary to maintain the ISS and conduct scientific experiments while simultaneously reading through lengthy instruction manuals. "Just try to analyse a water sample while scrolling through pages of a procedure manual displayed on a computer monitor while you and the computer both float in microgravity," says US astronaut Michael Fincke, who spent six months on the station in 2004.

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.

A computer that learns to play a'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers. CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own "hypotheses" about the game's rules. In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. The older approach is fraught with problems, as computers struggle when faced with situations that fall outside the remit of these rules and when new rules are introduced. "A system that can observe events in an unknown scenario, learn and participate just as a child would is almost the Holy Grail of AI," says Derek Magee from the University of Leeds.

In a move seemingly strait out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans. DARPA said the program, known as Mind's Eye, should generate the ability for machines to have the "perceptual and cognitive abilities for recognizing and reasoning about the actions it sees and report or act upon it." "Humans perform a wide range of visual tasks with ease, something no current artificial intelligence can do in a robust way. They have inherently strong spatial judgment and are able to learn new spatiotemporal concepts directly from the visual experience. Humans visualize scenes and objects, as well as the actions involving those objects and possess a powerful ability to manipulate those imagined scenes mentally to solve problems. A machine-based implementation of such abilities is broadly applicable to a wide range of applications, including ground surveillance," DARPA stated.

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.

Patients can now guide robotic limbs using devices implanted in their brains. For the first time since accidents severed the neural connection between their brains and limbs, a small number of patients are reaching out and feeling the world with prosthetic devices wired directly to their brains. Earlier this month, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena implanted a person's brain with electrode arrays that read neural activity to control a robotic arm and stimulate the brain to deliver a sensation of what the arm touched. And since 2011, a team at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania has been working with a small number of people who control prostheses through neural implants. "It's moving quick at the moment," says Christian Klaes, a neuroscientist on the Caltech effort.

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.