This year has seen some notable advancements in computer-based brain mimicry, not just on the artificial intelligence (AI) front, but also related to in silico brain simulations. Watson's vanquishing of Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in February set the stage for the year. The now world-famous IBM super exhibited a sophisticated understanding of language semantics along with the ability to integrate that understanding into a complex analytics engine. Since the Jeopardy match, IBM has been looking to take the technology into the commercial realm, most notably in the health care arena. Meanwhile projects like FACETS (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) and SpiNNaker are working to uncover the nature of the brain at the level of the neuron.

Or your teenage son becomes immersed, with increasing agitation, in a computer game. As his temper worsens, his performance declines until he ends up trashing the console in a fit of adolescent rage. Computer angst - now a universal feature of modern life - is an expensive business. But the days of the unfeeling, infuriating machine will soon be over. Thanks to break throughs in AI (artificial intelligence), psychology, electronics and other research fields, scientists are now creating computers and robots that can detect, and respond to, users' feelings.

Google will not allow apps that implement facial recognition on its Google Glass product, the company says, citing privacy concerns, after an American company said it would offer a commercial service to recognise celebrities and others. Developers have pointed out though that it is possible to load apps - which Google calls "Glassware" - onto the wearable system without needing Google's permission. Those could then communicate with any of a growing number of services which say they can connect a name with a face once given a photo. Equally, users could simply upload still pictures to other online services which would provide the facial recognition service. "A'ban' is purely symbolic," commented Martin Macdonald, a marketing director for Expedia EAN who has tried Google Glass.

'The best is the enemy of the good," said Voltaire. It's a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire's rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best.

Faced with an enemy fighter jet, there's one sensible thing a military drone should do: split. But in December 2002, caught in the crosshairs of an Iraqi MiG, an unmanned US Predator was instructed to stay put. The MiG fired, the Predator fired back and the result, unhappily for the US, was a heap of drone parts on the southern Iraqi desert. This incident is often regarded as the first dogfight between a drone, properly known as an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV, and a conventional, manned fighter. Yet in a way, the Predator hardly stood a chance.

Mapping the brain is all the rage. In 2009, the National Institutes of Health announced the Human Connectome Project, an ambitious multimillion-dollar initiative to produce a detailed map of the long-range connections in the human brain. Two years later, the Allen Institute for Brain Science launched the Allen Brain Atlas, a collection of online public resources that integrate information about gene activity with neuroanatomical data. And earlier this year, President Obama announced the Brain Activity Map project, which aims to "reconstruct the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. Now an international team of researchers led by Katrin Amunts of the Ju lich Research Center in Germany has created the most detailed map yet of the human brain.

He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.

Within a decade millions of workers will be at home juggling their careers with caring for children and older relatives, Britain's leading management institute forecast yesterday. Dreams of a future when technological advances would liberate us from the daily drudge and allow more time for leisure appear to be fading, with futurologists predicting less talk about "work-life balance" and more about "work-life integration". A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and career. In a list of scenarios drawn up by the Chartered Management Institute and launched at a seminar in London yesterday by Sir John Sunderland, chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, companies were warned to prepare for a range of more remote possibilities, including a world under cyber attack, the use of holograms for communication between staff, and controlling employee behaviour by implanting microchips in their brains. More probable scenarios included a polarisation of businesses, with large corporations consolidating global control and becoming more powerful than the governments of some big countries.

Fulfilling the dreams of bosses everywhere, Wakamaru San is never late, doesn't gossip or throw sickies, and somewhat unnervingly never stops smirking. That's because one-metre tall Wakamaru is an android, whose idea of a tea break is to find the nearest power socket and recharge itself when its battery runs low. This Mitsubishi-made winsome bot is part of the vanguard of so-called "second generation" robots, autonomous machines designed to help around the home and workplace - permanently. In the first serious attempt to commercialise a robot that can work in the office, 10 little Wakamarus touting "strong receptionist skills" were recently taken on by an employment agency in Japan, where they are now for hire for £12,000 a year. Other bots are muscling in on Japan's increasingly mechanised construction industry, though those look far from the "humanoid" type robot, such as Wakamaru, that we have been led to expect by science fiction. In fact, really clever, human-like robots may still be decades away (see below) but gradually robot manufacturers are moving from creating machines that work mostly in the automotive sector to other industries, such as the food business, while many robots are becoming consumer products.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, someone had the idea that science would be at its most interesting when it was being subverted. Just as science itself was developing, storytellers began expanding the worlds of physics, biology, chemistry and engineering. They came up with a universe full of lightsabers, spaceships and robots, steeped in a heady brew of technobabble and draped on a background of journeys to exotic worlds. But science fiction is more than just pulp fiction; at its core is the desire to understand humanity's place in the universe. We asked leading scientists from around the world what science fiction meant to them: how they related to it and what influence it had on them.