The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. "The Google Lunar X Prize calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from around the world to return us to the lunar surface and explore this environment for the benefit of all humanity," said Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit prize-generating group. We look forward to bringing the historic private space race into every home and classroom." The X Prize Foundation staged a splashy event to announce the contest here at the Wired NextFest conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Diamandis, Google co-founder Larry Page and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin were all on hand to talk about the prize. The press conference also featured video commentary from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Tesla Motors backer Elon Musk and filmmaker James Cameron, who applauded new private industry efforts in space exploration. "We're going back to the moon not because of a massive government program...This is Moon 2.0 with private industry...kick-starting the future of space exploration," Cameron said. The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics. Page, who is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation, said that he and Google co-founder Brin were excited to fund the prize because they wanted to get kids around the world excited about engineering, math and science. "I gave a speech recently, saying that science has a serious marketing problem.

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.

The fully programmable Nao robot has been used to experiment with machine ethics. In his 1942 short story'Runaround', science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics -- engineering safeguards and built-in ethical principles that he would go on to use in dozens of stories and novels. They were: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Fittingly, 'Runaround' is set in 2015. Real-life roboticists are citing Asimov's laws a lot these days: their creations are becoming autonomous enough to need that kind of guidance.

When a select band of computer scientists met at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1956 to begin work on a field they called'artificial intelligence', they were optimistic, to say the least. Their founding principle of developing machine intelligence was based on an assumption that human intelligence could itself be well characterized. They argued that: "Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Ask ten people to define human intelligence and you will get at least eleven answers. To a philosopher, intelligence is the absence of a lack of intelligence.

Three research papers about the potential power of computers to outsmart us -- while comforting us with cute pet videos -- caught the attention of the online science community this week. Researchers shared a PLoS ONE paper about a computational fact-checker that can sort truth from fiction; an arXiv preprint about a computer program that can read and comprehend news stories; and a study of the psychology of watching Internet cat videos. In the PLoS ONE paper1, researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington mined Wikipedia's information boxes, which summarize the key facts in most Wikipedia entries, to create a'knowledge graph' of 3 million people, places and things. The resulting algorithm could then use that knowledge to gauge the truth of simple statements that were presented to it, such as "Rome is the capital of Italy", with nearly the same accuracy as human fact-checkers. The researchers acknowledge that the source material is not 100% reliable, something that online commenters also noted.

Particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider produce huge amounts of data, which algorithms are well placed to process. The next generation of particle-collider experiments will feature some of the world's most advanced thinking machines, if links now being forged between particle physicists and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers take off. Such machines could make discoveries with little human input -- a prospect that makes some physicists queasy. Driven by an eagerness to make discoveries and the knowledge that they will be hit with unmanageable volumes of data in ten years' time, physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, are enlisting the help of AI experts. On 9–13 November, leading lights from both communities attended a workshop -- the first of its kind -- at which they discussed how advanced AI techniques could speed discoveries at the LHC. Particle physicists have "realized that they cannot do it alone", says Cécile Germain, a computer scientist at the University of Paris South in Orsay, who spoke at the workshop at CERN, the particle-physics lab that hosts the LHC.

A competition to find the best conversational computer programme will be hosted by the Bletchley Park Trust. As part of the 2012 celebrations for the Alan Turing centenary, the Trust is delighted to be hosting the annual Loebner Prize competition. The chatbot programmes will be competing for a coveted bronze medal and a prize fund of $7,000 sponsored by Dr Hugh Loebner who founded the competition twenty years ago. The Loebner Prize competition is based on the Turing Test, one of the biggest challenges in the world of Artificial Intelligence. The test was proposed by Alan Turing in his famous 1950 paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, as a way of determining whether a computer programme could be said to be intelligent.

Google's Go-playing program AlphaGo will take on world champion Lee Sedol in a series of games in Korea next month with a $1 million prize for the winner. Go is a 2,500-year-old game that was mentioned by Confucius. Players take turns placing black or white stones on a grid, capturing opponents' stones or surrounding spaces to take territory. AlphaGo has already bested a ranking Go master in Europe. AlphaGo, developed by Google's London-based artificial intelligence team DeepMind, trounced the best Go-playing AI programs in a series of matches, as reported by Nature last month.

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.

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.