Three college kids in Australia have built an autonomous vehicle controlled by a smartphone. To be fair, calling it a "vehicle" is a bit of a stretch. What Tommi Sullivan, Michael Lennon, and Yukito Tsunoda have made at Griffith University in Queensland is the coolest freaking Power Wheels you've ever seen. They used the same four-wheeled plastic toy we drove as toddlers and an Android smartphone to create a fully-functional autonomous "car" that took home the 2013 Queensland iAwards in Brisbane. "A normal unmanned vehicle would usually use a camera or a different sensor or a Ladar [sic] on the top," said Sullivan, who's working on his bachelor's degree in information technology.

Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone. "I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand. The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

Manufacturing, finance, and the communications industry have in the last decade all come to rely upon artificial intelligence. But there's one industry that continues to put up resistance: the legal profession. The idea of a machine making legal decisions was long considered by opponents to be dangerous and ethically untenable. That's about to change, says John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Zeleznikow believes AI is about to improve people's access to justice and massively reduce the costs of running legal services.

Siri was not the first speech recognition application to grace our phones, but its success will help increase expectations for more artificial intelligence in business. Siri combines speech recognition and natural language processing with artificial intelligence and search algorithms in the cloud to behave like an intelligent human assistant. It stops short of predicting, but it sounds like it does. Even more predictive technologies are starting to be applied to business applications to help us wade through the seemingly unsurmountable volume of data compounding every day. Edith Cowan University in Perth is using a predictive model developed by IBM to identify students at risk of leaving a course before they finish.

Can training to become ambidextrous improve brain function? Although teaching people to become ambidextrous has been popular for centuries, this practice does not appear to improve brain function, and it may even harm our neural development. Calls for ambidexterity were especially prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, in the early 20th century English propagandist John Jackson established the Ambidextral Culture Society in pursuit of universal ambidexterity and "two-brainedness" for the betterment of society. This hype died down in the mid-20th century as benefits of being ambidextrous failed to materialize.

A REVOLUTIONARY hearing aid was just one of a number of new technological exhibits on show at the Men's Health Expo in Tamworth yesterday to coincide with Men's Health Week. A REVOLUTIONARY hearing aid was just one of a number of new technological exhibits on show at the Men's Health Expo in Tamworth yesterday to coincide with Men's Health Week. The hearing aid allows the person wearing it to focus on a specific conversation more clearly while drowning out any other noises in the room. It has been designed to select the best speech over noise using parallel processing through a new concept called syncro. Spokesman James Battersby for Oticon, which manufactures the hearing aid, said already the revolutionary device was a big hit in Australia after only being launched three weeks ago.

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.

Thanks to some clever technology, which Sonico suggests is "sophisticated voice recognition and machine translation software," users can communicate clearly and precisely by simply talking into their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Interestingly, it's revealed in the credits to be Nuance and Microsoft Translator powering the app. A simple interface, rather bare on the iPad, shows two button shaped microphones, each with the flag of the country you want to translate from and too. Tap to speak, tap the button again when you stop speaking, and both a written version of your speech and translation quickly appears, along with an audio translation, complete with convincing accent. It's all very simple, mostly accurate and greatly impressive, not least as iTranslate Voice can currently be had for as little as $0.99, an absolute bargain.

Guam - While preparing for the first Saturday of college football for the 2011 season, I took a dinner break from studying charts, rosters, matchups and the pre-season Top 25 polls to watch one of my favorite shows, Modern Marvels on History Channel. It just so happened that the episode I caught profiled the technology used to manage crops. And remarkably, in a vignette about how grapes are picked en masse, the producers strongly emphasized a major advantage used in such work to achieve optimal systemic results: the harmonious synergy of man and machine. About 20 minutes hence, the episode having concluded and a delicious berry salad already beginning to digest in my belly, my thoughts returned to all things pigskin, wondering if the Bowl Championship Series, which utilizes the average of two human polls and a computer poll, might actually generate more reliable, reproducible results if it were run exclusively on machine learning. Let me break it down for you.