Carnegie Mellon's teams now compete against Georgia Tech and the University of Texas at Austin in the four-legged robot league, and against Texas in the simulation league. Georgia Tech's team is led by Veloso's former post-doctoral researcher, Tucker Balch, and the Texas teams are led by Veloso's former graduate student Peter Stone. At the international level, Veloso's former graduate student, Will Uther, participates on the team from the University of New South Wales in Australia, which finished second to Carnegie Mellon in the four-legged robot league at RoboCup 2002.

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.

Fortunately, in the real world, it's pretty hard to overthrow a democracy and introduce a totalitarian regime, just to see what happens. But that's not to say sociologists, anthropologists and economists wouldn't like to try. And that's why the rapid growth of virtual worlds, from Second Life to World of Warcraft (see image, left), is such an exciting prospect for researchers in these fields. For those who normally have to rely on time-consuming fieldwork, small-scale laboratory experiments, or the lessons of history, virtual worlds offer the tantalising prospect of a real sociological laboratory. This prospect is explored in some detail in an interesting review paper in last week's Science.

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was found to have falsified results published in the European Journal of Neurology in 2011; three of his papers have been retracted.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.

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.

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.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has claimed that computers with human like intelligence were not so far as everyone thought they were. Speaking during a business meet in Australia, Wozniak predicted that in his lifetime he would see computers with artificial intelligence. He said to a bewildered crowd that humans had set to create machines that make their jobs easier adding that mankind strives to come up with technology does a particular job instead of them doing it. "Every time we create new technology we're creating stuff to do the work we used to do and we're making ourselves less meaningful, less relevant," Wozniak said. "Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We're just going to have the easy life," he added.

After spending decades in the shadows as a specialty discipline, machine learning is suddenly front and center as a business tool. The hard part, though, is making it useful, especially to the developers and budding data scientists who are being tasked with the job. To that end, we rounded up some of the most common and useful open source machine learning tools we've spotted in the wild. For Python: Data scientists have jumped on Python as a more open-ended alternative to analytical languages like R, and many employers looking to add big-data expertise to their rosters are listing Python as a desired skill. As a result, plenty of machine learning libraries have shown up in Python's ever-expanding software roster.

Turing proposed his test in a spirit of down-to-earth pragmatism. He saw that, when faced with the question, "Is it possible to build a machine that can think?", Turing hoped that his test would cut through a lot of fruitless semantic debate. It was an engineer's solution, rather than a philosopher's. Perhaps inevitably, Turing's proposal merely redirected the philosophical debate. Instead of quarrelling about the meaning of the verb "to think", philosophers argued about the meaning of the Turing test instead.