For the first time ever, NASA has been relying on private companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX for re-supply missions; only that's just the beginning. This QuickTake examines the future of space tourism using private space taxis. FILE - In this Tuesday, July 26, 2016, file photo, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., left, discusses the company's new Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev. On Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2016, Tesla reports financial results. SAN FRANCISCO - Elon Musk is gleefully pushing the technological envelope in the arenas of rocketry, transportation and solar energy.

PARKFIELD, Calif., July 9 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they observed changes in seismic wave speeds before two small California earthquakes -- a finding that might lead to quake forecasts. Study co-author Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution said the discovery was made at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, located halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The observatory consists of two holes drilled into the fault zone. The researchers told the BBC they generate seismic waves deep in one hole and then time their arrival at a seismometer in the other hole. The speed of the waves varies due to stress-induced cracks opening and closing in the rocks.

Although this Statement focuses on the enormous safety potential of these new technologies, they offer an even wider range of possible benefits. Vehicle control systems that automatically accelerate and brake with the flow of traffic can conserve fuel more efficiently than the average driver. By eliminating a large number of vehicle crashes, highly effective crash avoidance technologies can reduce fuel consumption by also eliminating the traffic congestion that crashes cause every day on our roads. Reductions in fuel consumption, of course, yield corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent vehicles can communicate with each other and with the highway infrastructure, the potential for safer and more efficient driving will be increased even more. Drivers--or vehicles themselves--will be able to make more intelligent route selections based on weather and traffic data received by the vehicle in real time. Mobility for those with a range of disabilities will be greatly enhanced if the basic driving functions can be safely performed by the vehicle itself, opening new windows for millions of people.

People in technology know there's more and more data being created, but artificial intelligence startup Numenta is tackling a slightly different problem: the speed at which data is produced. The Silicon Valley company, founded by mobile computing pioneer Jeff Hawkins, last week said energy-efficiency company EnerNoc is among a small group of businesses now testing its software. Its product, called Grok, is designed to process data to yield some sort of prediction or insight. The software is modeled on how the human brain processes data and is particularly well suited for handling streams of information, such as data from a sensor on regular intervals, the company says. EnerNoc is using Grok to earn more revenue from its demand response customers who agree to reduce electricity. Grid operators pay EnerNoc for aggregating many of these energy reductions at buildings to maintain a steady grid frequency.

Few people ever need to deal with a stricken nuclear reactor, but that skill could turn out to be important for the evolution of smarter robots. In Pomona, California, this week, 25 of the world's most advanced humanoid robots will take part in a contest inspired by the challenge of stabilizing a nuclear reactor that's leaking dangerous radioactive material. Teams from universities across the U.S., as well as Japan, China, and Europe, are bringing robots that will try to walk across piles of rubble, climb ladders, operate power tools, and drive buggies, among other chores. Each challenge is inspired by something that might have helped stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan after it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011. Considerable academic kudos will go to whichever team completes the most tasks within the allotted time by the end of the contest.

Former Enron executive Vincent Kaminski is a modest, semi-retired business school professor from Houston who recently wrote a 960-page book explaining the fundamentals of energy markets. His most lasting legacy, however, may involve thousands of e-mails he wrote more than a decade ago at the energy-services company. Kaminski, a former managing director for research who warned repeatedly about concerning practices he saw at Enron, is among more than 150 senior executives whose e-mail boxes were dumped onto the Internet by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on March 26, 2003. In the name of serving the public's interest during its investigation of Enron, the federal agency made the controversial decision to post online more than 1.6 million e-mails that Enron executives sent and received from 2000 through 2002. FERC eventually culled the trove to remove the most sensitive and personal data, after receiving complaints (see PDF).

It's a hot late-spring Friday on a cactus-studded cattle ranch in Mexico, and nothing is happening. Nothing, in fact, has been happening for going on a week now, and it's starting to get tedious. Ordinarily, the group of scientists, engineers, and students who have gathered here might have enjoyed a respite from their otherwise crazy schedules. But they didn't come here to catch up on their reading, play the guitar, or take long, leisurely walks. They came here to work. Their goal is to field-test one of the most intelligent and agile underwater robots ever crafted, a possible predecessor of a machine that might someday swim the vast, ice-crusted ocean of Jupiter's mysterious moon Europa. Called DEPTHX, for DEep Phreatic THermal eXplorer, the 1.3-metric-ton machine can maneuver freely, draw detailed, three-dimensional maps of its watery surroundings, and collect solid and liquid biological samples as it senses changing conditions in its environment. Most important, it does all that without any guidance from human operators. Such autonomy would be essential if the robot ever does swim on Europa--which may be warm enough, thanks to geothermal activity, to have given rise to some sort of life. Human control of a robot sub that far away isn't an option: radio waves don't effectively penetrate water. Even if they did, a round-trip radio signal would take 2 hours or more, making remote control unlikely. But today, on this sweltering retreat near the Gulf Coast of Mexico, with cicadas buzzing and a hazy sun beating down, Europa seems a long way off.

On a white sand beach tucked between gleaming upscale resorts along the west coast of Barbados, a group of sunburned computer scientists, graduate students, and technicians look on intently as a small canary-yellow robot ambles up and down the beach. A few curious beachgoers soon join them. The robot is more than just lovable. With six rotating flippers, three on each side of its boxy metal carapace, this machine is amphibious, capable of both walking and swimming--an attribute that is unique in the robot world. As more onlookers gather, the little robot heads out through the surf and disappears into the turquoise waters that surround this Caribbean island.

FREIGHTER GAP, Wyo.--On blisteringly hot desert sands, researchers crawled on their hands and knees avoiding fist-size cacti littering the ground. Their goal: collecting bones and teeth of some of the earliest known primates to shed light on the adaptations at the root of the evolutionary lineage that led to humans. The fossils, though, are the size of a fingernail or smaller, and they are scattered over an area of about 10,000 square kilometers in the rocky desert of Wyoming's Great Divide Basin. That's a lot of ground to cover, especially on all fours and in searing heat. So the scientists are relying on a tool never tried before in paleontology: artificial intelligence.

Report on the 1984 Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshop. Reprinted in Readings in Artificial Intelligence and Databases, J. Mylopoulos and M. L. Brodie, editors, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1988. Report on the 1984 Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshop. Reprinted in Readings in Artificial Intelligence and Databases, J. Mylopoulos and M. L. Brodie, editors, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1988.