Dr. Saul Amarel, who helped develop the field of artificial intelligence and founded the computer science department at Rutgers University, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. The cause was complications of cancer, according to Rutgers. At Rutgers, Dr. Amarel developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. He took a leave in the 1980's to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers in 1988. Among his peers, Dr. Amarel was perhaps best known for a paper he wrote in 1968, which put him at the vanguard of the artificial intelligence movement.

EARLY in the film ''A Beautiful Mind,'' the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Mr. Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually won a Nobel Prize. In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination -- and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap.

A woman holds up a tablet to showcase data analytics conducted by IBM's Watson technology. A woman holds up a tablet to showcase data analytics conducted by IBM's Watson technology. Guruduth Banavar is an executive at IBM leading the team developing a new generation of cognitive systems -- don't call it artificial intelligence -- known as Watson. Watson, of course, is the supercomputer most famous for its victory against two men on Jeopardy! in 2011. IBM is now lending Watson's computing power to startups and businesses across all types of industries, including healthcare, energy, education and even food.

In Leena Krohn's novella "Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone," the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. "What does the word refer to," she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, "does it really signify anything at all?"

Pilot Matt Standridge will compete in the Cybathlon using an exoskeleton from the University of Houston's Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory designed to help people with paraplegia to walk. Vance Bergeron was once an amateur cyclist who rode 7,000 kilometres per year -- much of it on steep climbs in the Alps. But in February 2013, as the 50-year-old chemical engineer was biking to work at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyons, France, he was hit by a car. The impact sent him flying through the air and onto his head, breaking his neck. When he woke, he learnt that he would never again move his legs on his own, and would have only limited use of his arms.

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.

Computer pioneer Willis Ware saw the future, and it worried him. In 1966, Ware, who worked as an engineer at Rand Corp., foresaw not only the omnipresence of personal computers, but also social networks like Twitter and Facebook. "The computer will touch men everywhere and in every way, almost on a minute-to-minute basis," he wrote in a paper presented at Rand 47 years ago. "Every man will communicate through a computer whatever he does. It will change and reshape his life, modify his career and force him to accept a life of continuous change."

Prof. Dr. (Juris) Jon Bing is the Institute leader of the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law, the second oldest academic institution in the world working specifically with the interrelationship of law and information / communication technology; Dr. Bing is the recipient of numerous international awards. He is the Editor of the news-letter Lov&data (Norwegian news-letter on computers and law, published by the Lawdata foundation) and is an editorial board member of over 16 international journals.

Robin John Popplestone, one of the early pioneers in Robotics and Computer Programming Languages, died on 14th April 2004 in Glasgow, Scotland, after a 10-year battle with prostate cancer. Robin was born in Bristol in 1938. After the war his family moved to Belfast, where he grew up. He was educated at Queen's University Belfast, receiving an honours degree in mathematics in 1960. He first worked with computing while studying for a PhD initially at Manchester University and then at Leeds University.

Born in South Africa, he was educated at the South African College High School, took a first degree at the University of Cape Town in 1934 and a doctorate in Mathematical Physics at the University of London in 1953. After a spell as demonstrator in physics at Cape Town, he emigrated to Britain. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, he undertook ionospheric research in Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, transferring to the Government's Telecommunications Research Establishment after the outbreak of hostilities to carry out research on radar. In 1941, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, leaving in 1943 to go to Aberdeen University to run a special degree course for radio officers under the wartime Hankey Scheme. After the war was over, he returned to industrial research, first until 1949 in Mullard's Radio Valve Company on microwave electronics and then on television and photo-electric tubes at EMI's Research Laboratories.