At least 160 federal agencies churn out rules and regulations -- more than 4,000 a year -- from specifying the height of steps on buses for the disabled to the method of calculating food's fiber content. Before finalizing a rule, government agencies are required to solicit and consider public comment, which, until recently meant publishing a notice in the Federal Register, accessible mostly to lobbyists. Now, all notices and requests for comment are to go through the Web site http://regulations.gov. Although that site communicates about as clearly as the instructions that come with income tax forms, it sometimes produces more public participation than regulators would prefer. To help the agencies deal with rule-making in the Internet age and make the process more accessible to the public, Cornell scientists and legal experts have created the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI), funded by a $750,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

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.

In a move seemingly strait out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans. DARPA said the program, known as Mind's Eye, should generate the ability for machines to have the "perceptual and cognitive abilities for recognizing and reasoning about the actions it sees and report or act upon it." "Humans perform a wide range of visual tasks with ease, something no current artificial intelligence can do in a robust way. They have inherently strong spatial judgment and are able to learn new spatiotemporal concepts directly from the visual experience. Humans visualize scenes and objects, as well as the actions involving those objects and possess a powerful ability to manipulate those imagined scenes mentally to solve problems. A machine-based implementation of such abilities is broadly applicable to a wide range of applications, including ground surveillance," DARPA stated.

Patients can now guide robotic limbs using devices implanted in their brains. For the first time since accidents severed the neural connection between their brains and limbs, a small number of patients are reaching out and feeling the world with prosthetic devices wired directly to their brains. Earlier this month, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena implanted a person's brain with electrode arrays that read neural activity to control a robotic arm and stimulate the brain to deliver a sensation of what the arm touched. And since 2011, a team at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania has been working with a small number of people who control prostheses through neural implants. "It's moving quick at the moment," says Christian Klaes, a neuroscientist on the Caltech effort.

Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Fridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, phones and smart devices are all now equipped with communicating sensors. In ten years, 150 billion'things' will connect with each other and with billions of people. The'Internet of Things' will generate data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months, as is the case now.

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.

The Modular Prosthetic Limb will help patients to feel and manipulate objects just as they would with a native hand. Sitting motionless in her wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down by a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson seems to take no notice of the cable rising from the top of her head through her curly dark hair. Her gaze never wavers as she mentally guides a robot arm beside her to reach across the table, close its grippers around the bottle, then slowly lift the vessel towards her mouth. Only when she finally manages to take a sip does her face relax into a luminous smile. This video of 58-year-old Hutchinson illustrates the strides being taken in brain-controlled prosthetics1.

There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking have in recent months warned of the dangers of intelligent robots becoming too powerful for humans to control. The ethical conundrum of intelligent machines and how they relate to humans has long been a theme of science fiction, and has been vividly portrayed in films such as 1982's Blade Runner and this year's Ex Machina. Academic and fictional analyses of AIs tend to focus on human–robot interactions, asking questions such as: would robots make our lives easier?

An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator. Most mine-disposal missions rely on either human divers or small explosives dropped from a ship. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that are tethered to a boat on the surface by an umbilical cord are also used, but their cables restrict how far the craft can roam. Most of these options require the people involved to be within a few hundred metres of the mined area, which can put lives at risk.

At the 24th Army Science Conference, held in Orlando, Florida last December, Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote address entitled "Warfighting in the 21st Century". Within 25 years, non-biological intelligence will match human intelligence in areas in which humans now excel, principally in pattern recognition. It will combine these abilities with the inherent advantages of machine intelligence, such as speed, easy sharing of knowledge and skills. One implication will be that we will enhance our own biological intelligence through direct connection with non-biological intelligence. Already, our abilities benefit from close collaboration with machines.