The race is on to develop self-driving cars that are able to navigate busy roads safely. Now, Amazon has been awarded a patent for a road network that controls how autonomous vehicles could one day navigate a busy motorway. The patent hints at Amazon's ambitions to control fleets of vehicles and roads as well as its dream of'reversible lanes' to help ease congestion. Reversible lanes could essentially change the direction of a flow of traffic, with the traffic management system communicating with cars to allow them to travel safely in the direction they want without slowing other vehicles down. The patent, awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, Virginia, reads: 'A roadway management system can generate lane configurations for a roadway or a portion of the roadway.

Federal investigators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have demanded automaker Tesla hand over details about a fatal May crash that occurred while a car was in autopilot mode. NHTSA, in a letter sent Friday to the car company, asked for all documentation related to the crash that killed Joshua David Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, in Williston, Fla., on May 7. The agency also requested information regarding the programming and manufacture of Tesla's Automatic Emergency Braking system, a product designed to assist autopilot and prevent frontal collisions. Tesla's responses are due back to the federal authorities in part by July 29 and in part by Aug. 26. The company could face $21,000 in fines per day if it is late. "This is a huge moment," Kelley Blue Book analyst Michael Harley said.

Ever since the 1980s, researchers have been working on the development of a quantum computer that would be exponentially more powerful than any of the digital computers that exist today. And now Google, in collaboration with NASA and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), says it has a quantum computer -- the D-Wave 2X -- that actually works. Google claims the D-Wave 2X is 100 million times faster than any of today's machines. As a result, this quantum computer could theoretically complete calculations within seconds to a problem that might take a digital computer 10,000 years to calculate. That's particularly important, given the difficult tasks that today's computers are called upon to complete and the staggering amount of data they are called upon to process.

People who rely on satnav could be at risk of losing their ability to navigate, an expert has warned. Writing in the journal Nature, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation Roger McKinlay argues that our reliance on GPS technology is misplaced and could be eroding our innate way-finding abilities. "If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation abilities will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices," he wrote. McKinlay believes huge investment will be needed before navigation systems will be good enough to allow technologies such as autonomous vehicles to take off. In the meantime, he argues, we need better research into systems for navigation while children should be encouraged to learn how to find their way around by more traditional means.

The Ministry of Defence is organising its first-ever "Robo-Wars" exercise this autumn, using drones, seacraft and a host of other innovations as part of the growing trend towards reducing the role of humans in combat. The large-scale event off the west coast of Scotland will form part of the regular UK-led Nato Joint Warriors exercise. The navy, on its website, is billing the robotic part as "Unmanned Warrior 2016", and says: "Recognising a commitment to innovation, the Royal Navy will host a large-scale demonstration in a tactically representative environment of maritime autonomous systems in the autumn of 2016." More than 80 countries around the world, including the US and China, have stepped up research and development of "killer robots" and other non-human forms of warfare. Although large-scale civilian casualties from robotic warfare – mainly from drones – are already a reality, military personnel, analysts and academics have predicted that combat would one day be conducted between armies of robots and unmanned vehicles.

IN A world of algorithms, there are still a few places where humans reign supreme. Instead, they are using eye-tracking and brain analysis to create a system that lets our natural intelligence shine. "It's a human and machine data system that collectively makes everything better," says Laura McNamara, an organisational anthropologist at Sandia National Laboratories. "Human beings are supremely good at pattern recognition, but what overwhelms that is having way too much data." What we're so good at is finding the signal in the noise.

Google DeepMind took a leap forward last year when its artificial intelligence agent mastered 49 Atari 2600 games. The learning system, or "deep Q-network" (DQN), that DeepMind designed achieved this mastery through general experience, rather than specific programming for each game. This milestone is just one step along a grander path toward the general-purpose "smart machine": an AI that can master any task with minimal input. DeepMind's work in this field is groundbreaking, and it's helping advance the field in ways you might not expect. Wojciech Jaśkowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Computing Science (ICS) at Poznan University of Technology, Poland.

Google argues that driverless cars improve highway safety while enabling lower federal spending on roads, buses, and trains. The government should support driverless cars because they will allow it to spend less on roads, public transport, and parking, Google will tell US law makers on Tuesday. A month after Google recorded its first own-fault accident in a self-driving car, Chris Urmson, head of the project at Google, will urge senators to allow the US Department of Transport to clear a path for the vehicles because they're safer and will ultimately cost the government less. Exactly what impact driverless cars will have on roads is still being debated. Some believe they will cut congestion due to the potential for car-sharing.

Dan Goldin, who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1990s, officially unveiled a company with more than $100 million in private investment to focus on neural computing. The company KnuEdge was founded in 2005, but its two divisions -- one focused on voice biometrics and the other on data center neural computing -- worked in stealth mode to bring its first two products to maturity. KnuEdge boasts that its voice recognition and authentication product, called KnuVerse, is military-grade technology that spent five years in production in "mission-critical battlefield conditions." It's now available for enterprises interested in building human-voice interfaces that can function in noisy, real-world environments. It can be used to build authentication systems into computers, web or mobile apps and IoT devices, relying on just a few words in any language.

Though ultimately a problem for philosophers and machine-learning specialists, we can answer this question using NASA's Curiosity rover with a resounding "Yes." Since landing on the Red Planet a year ago, our silicon-based envoy has been exploring, experimenting, and, for the most part, photographing Mars. It has produced pictures at an incredible rate, often nearly 1,000 per day, and its raw image gallery is currently overflowing with more than 71,000 photos. Curiosity is armed with an impressive array of cameras and the continual snaps it sends back to mission control help scientists and engineers decide where the rover should go next and what rocks to prod. But for the rest of us watching the mission closely, the pictures provide a portal that goes straight to Mars.