One of the UK's earliest humanoid robots has been unearthed after spending 45 years stored in a garage. The robot's creator, Tony Sale, talks about how George came about. Rationing during and after World War II gave rise to the make do and mend ethos that saw many people exercise their ingenuity to feed and clothe themselves. Some, such as Tony Sale, took the scavenging attitude far beyond simply unravelling woollen socks to help patch a pullover. In 1950 Mr Sale, then aged 19, created a robot named George out of scrap metal that came from a crashed Wellington bomber. Pilot Officer Sale, as he was then, was stationed at RAF Debden where he was employed to teach pilots how to use radar.

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance. A robot arm builds "babies" that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention. The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings. The work by teams in Cambridge and Zurich has been published in the journal PLOS One. It seems like a plot from a science fiction film: a robot that builds other robots - each one better than the previous generation.

A Canadian firm has courted controversy with its claim to have built a practical quantum computer, a feat thought to be decades away. Now, independent researchers are trying to understand whether it really can tap the strange world of quantum physics. For the modest sum of $15m (£9m), a start-up near Vancouver will sell you a black box the size of a garden shed with its logo emblazoned on the side in white neon. What if I told you the contents of the box were kept colder than the temperature of interstellar space? How about this: The box contains a machine that can solve some of the thorniest mathematical problems and could revolutionise computing.

Activity observed in the brain when using a "mind machine" is similar to how the brain learns new motor skills, scientists have found. Participants' neural activity was recorded by using sensors implanted in their brain, which were linked to a computer that translated electrical impulses into actions. The researchers believe people will be able to perform increasingly complex tasks just by thinking them. The subjects in the study moved from thinking about a task to automatically processing a task, in a similar way to how other motor movements are learnt - like playing the piano or learning to ride a bicycle. This was shown by the areas of neurons that were active in the brain, which changed as subjects became more adept at a mental task.

The "Pandora's box" of unmanned aircraft in the UK has been opened, according to the Astraea consortium. Yet many technology and ethics issues surrounding civilian drones are yet to be solved, journalists at London's Science Media Centre were told. The UK-led, £62m Astraea project - which has participation of the UK Civil Aviation Authority - is attempting to tackle all facets of the idea. Later in November, they will carry out a crucial collision-avoidance test. Unmanned aircraft or UAs is something of a new name for drones, which have gained notoriety principally in the theatre of war where remotely operated aircraft are used for surveillance or air strikes.

An 18th Century automaton that could beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of genius, says Adam Gopnik. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Turk. That sounds, I know, like a very 19th Century remark. "Have you been thinking about the Turk?" one bearded British statesman might have asked another in the 1860s, with an eye to the Sublime Porte and Russian designs on it, and all the rest.

She is only 19 but has already experimented with neural networks, built prototype software to help doctors diagnose breast cancer, won a $50,000 college scholarship from Google and been invited to the White House to showcase her research. Brittany Wenger wants a dual career as a paediatric oncologist and research scientist. The teenager from Sarasota, Florida, became interested in neural networks - a form of artificial intelligence that continuously learns and mimics the human brain - in high school. She was building a neural network that could play soccer, her favourite game, when her cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer, inspiring her to put her talents to medical use. Ms Wenger came up with the idea of creating an artificial intelligence software program to analyse data from a breast tissue biopsy.

HSBC is launching voice recognition and touch security services in the UK in a big leap towards the introduction of biometric banking. The bank says its phone and mobile banking customers will no longer have to remember a password or memorable places and dates to access accounts. Barclays has already introduced voice recognition software, but it is only available to certain clients. RBS and NatWest have offered finger print technology for the last year. The move comes weeks ahead of the launch of Atom Bank, which will allow its customers to log on via a face recognition system.

When your closest sporting rivals are running a business with an annual team budget worth more than three times your own, then you need to be innovative in sustaining a challenge. And when it is in a cutting edge sport like Formula 1, then teams such as Williams Martini have to make sure every penny they spend is put to best inventive use. The UK-based team's IT director Graeme Hackland says they spend about £100m ($154m) a year in F1, compared with what he says is Mercedes' outlay of £300-350m, and Ferrari's of £250-300m. But despite the spending disparity, the UK-based team, which has won the constructor's table nine times, hopes that technology, rather than splashing cash, can help them close the gap. "We believe we can take them on," the 48-year-old South African, who has worked in F1 for 18 years, tells the BBC.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.