This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Nancy J. Nersessian's research is driven by the question "How do scientists think?" Nersessian's research focuses on how the cognitive and learning practices of scientists and engineers lead to creative and innovative outcomes. She is a Regents' Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology with joint appointments in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts School of Public Policy and the College of Computing School of Interactive Computing. Her research supports the insight that scientists think not only with ideas, but also with the artifacts they create to investigate nature.

The captain s mission: To obtain information about the local medical facilities. On the computer screen in front of me, an animated Army captain is attempting to speak with an Iraqi hospital receptionist. This is a fictional scenario in a state-of-the-art military training game. On the other side of the virtual room, the receptionist listens politely as the captain explains that he has come with supplies and he would like to speak to the hospital director. The receptionist seems to hesitate, but then responds that he will be happy to assist.

The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. When it comes to incredible science, 2015 will be hard to top. Among a number of notable events, we got our first, thrilling look at Pluto, found evidence that liquid water still flows on Mars and began facing the reality that human gene editing is closer than ever thanks to the CRISPR system.

When Skechers started building a colossal distribution center in Moreno Valley six years ago, backers promised a wave of new jobs. Instead, by the time the company moved to the Moreno Valley, it had closed five facilities in Ontario that employed 1,200 people and cut its workforce by more than half. Today, spotting a human on the premises can feel like an accomplishment. There are now only about 550 people working at one cavernous warehouse, which is about as big as two Staples Centers combined. Many of them sit behind computer screens, monitoring the activities of the facility's true workhorses: robotic machines.

FORTY years ago, at the height of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to lay claim to the cosmos, a much-anticipated science-fiction movie made its debut, and sci-fi was never the same again. Kids whose parents dragged them along to the theater were alternately bemused, disturbed and mesmerized. We knew we'd seen a grown-up movie, even if we couldn't completely make sense of it all. We were being initiated into a cultural dialogue that was, after all, about our future. The movie, of course, was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many critics and much of the public instantly recognized it as a landmark. It was, wrote L.A. Times film critic Charles Champlin, "the picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."

Stanford University's robot racing team Sunday was declared the winner of $2 million in the Defense Department's Grand Challenge race to develop an autonomous vehicle that could become a model for battlefield robots. The team's technology-laden robotic vehicle, a converted Volkswagen sport utility vehicle named Stanley, navigated a 131-mile course in the southern Nevada desert in 6 hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds, beating the second-place finisher, Carnegie Mellon University's Sandstorm Humvee, by about 11 minutes. The race was Saturday, but a winner was not declared until Sunday, after race judges computed the results. "This was absolutely incredible," said Anthony Tether, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which sponsored the race. Tether presented a giant facsimile of a check to the blue-shirted Stanford team, which cheered and poured champagne over one another.

Hendrik Hamann is into cloud computing -- as in real clouds, those puffy things in the sky. Working at IBM alongside some of the computer giant's most advanced systems, Hamann and his team seek a breakthrough in cloud-cover forecasting. They're aiming to help ease the introduction of solar electricity into the nation's major power grids, as solar-generated power is increasingly being loaded onto the grid, propelled by government mandates and solar-technology price declines. There's a big problem with solar power that the IBM team is trying to solve: You can't pump out much electricity on a cloudy day. Another source of power has to take its place.

A day after the disclosure of the first death in a crash involving a self-driving vehicle, BMW on Friday announced plans to release a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by 2021. In a partnership with Intel and Mobileye, the German automaker said its planned iNEXT model won't require a human in the driver's seat. That marks a different course toward self-driving vehicles than Tesla, which offers a self-driving "autopilot" feature to those participating in a "public beta phase" -- though drivers are supposed to stay engaged and keep their hands on the steering wheel. That system was in use during a fatal crash in Florida in May in which a Tesla Model S failed to detect a big-rig in its path and apply the brakes. BMW Chief Executive Harold Krueger addressed the Tesla crash during a news conference in Munich, Germany, on Friday, saying his company is not yet ready to roll out partially or fully autonomous vehicles.

In another Minority Report-like research finding, a UCLA research team has made crucial advances in "brain reading," using fMRI and machine learning methods to predict reactions of smokers experiencing nicotine cravings. The research, presented last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging workshop in Spain, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is interested in using these methods to help people control drug cravings. At UCLA's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state -- or sometimes the thought process -- of human subjects. The technique is called "brain reading" or "brain decoding."

AARON the Cybernetic Artist is an artist in the truest sense. AARON's approach to art, color and composition are authentic and reprensent the life's work of Professor Harold Cohen. AARON paintings have hung in museums around the world including London's Tate Modern Gallery, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Washington Capitol Children's Museum to name a few.