The captain s mission: To obtain information about the local medical facilities. On the computer screen in front of me, an animated Army captain is attempting to speak with an Iraqi hospital receptionist. This is a fictional scenario in a state-of-the-art military training game. On the other side of the virtual room, the receptionist listens politely as the captain explains that he has come with supplies and he would like to speak to the hospital director. The receptionist seems to hesitate, but then responds that he will be happy to assist.

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.

When Skechers started building a colossal distribution center in Moreno Valley six years ago, backers promised a wave of new jobs. Instead, by the time the company moved to the Moreno Valley, it had closed five facilities in Ontario that employed 1,200 people and cut its workforce by more than half. Today, spotting a human on the premises can feel like an accomplishment. There are now only about 550 people working at one cavernous warehouse, which is about as big as two Staples Centers combined. Many of them sit behind computer screens, monitoring the activities of the facility's true workhorses: robotic machines.

Stanford University's robot racing team Sunday was declared the winner of $2 million in the Defense Department's Grand Challenge race to develop an autonomous vehicle that could become a model for battlefield robots. The team's technology-laden robotic vehicle, a converted Volkswagen sport utility vehicle named Stanley, navigated a 131-mile course in the southern Nevada desert in 6 hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds, beating the second-place finisher, Carnegie Mellon University's Sandstorm Humvee, by about 11 minutes. The race was Saturday, but a winner was not declared until Sunday, after race judges computed the results. "This was absolutely incredible," said Anthony Tether, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which sponsored the race. Tether presented a giant facsimile of a check to the blue-shirted Stanford team, which cheered and poured champagne over one another.

IBM's Watson, the computational genius that has bested "Jeopardy" champions, published a cookbook and even been unleashed in the fight against cancer, now has what is perhaps its greatest challenge: taking on the federal procurement morass. For years, government agencies have tried to find ways to make the purchasing process more efficient. But now the Air Force has come to the conclusion that humans cannot on their own manage the Federal Acquisition Regulation, 1,897 pages of the densest prose on the planet. The only way to navigate a stifling bureaucracy that virtually everyone agrees is broken is to turn to the power of the machine. The Air Force is working with two vendors, both of which have chosen Watson, IBM's cognitive learning computer, to develop programs that would harness artificial intelligence to help businesses and government acquisitions officials work through the mind-numbing system.

Michigan would no longer require that someone be inside a self-driving car while testing it on public roads under legislation passed unanimously Wednesday by the state Senate, where backers touted the measures as necessary to keep the U.S. auto industry's home state ahead of the curve on rapidly advancing technology. The expansive bills, which are on track for final legislative approval by year's end, would make Michigan a rare state to explicitly end a requirement that a researcher be inside an autonomous test vehicle. The researcher would have to "promptly" take control of its movements remotely if necessary, or the vehicle would have to be able to stop or slow on its own. Supporters said the human-operator requirement is seen as an impediment that could put Michigan at risk of losing research and development to other states. Other provisions would allow for public operation of driverless vehicles when they are sold, ease the "platooning" of autonomous commercial trucks traveling closely together at electronically coordinated speeds and help create a facility to test autonomous and wirelessly connected cars at highway speeds at the site of a defunct General Motors plant that once churned out World War II bombers.

Hendrik Hamann is into cloud computing -- as in real clouds, those puffy things in the sky. Working at IBM alongside some of the computer giant's most advanced systems, Hamann and his team seek a breakthrough in cloud-cover forecasting. They're aiming to help ease the introduction of solar electricity into the nation's major power grids, as solar-generated power is increasingly being loaded onto the grid, propelled by government mandates and solar-technology price declines. There's a big problem with solar power that the IBM team is trying to solve: You can't pump out much electricity on a cloudy day. Another source of power has to take its place.

Science fiction writer David Brin calls it "a tsunami of lights" -- a future where tiny cameras are everywhere, lighting up everything we do, and even predicting what we'll do next. Unlike George Orwell's novel "1984," where only Big Brother controlled the cameras, in 2015, cheap, mobile technology has turned everyone into a watcher. A snowboarder with a GoPro can post a YouTube video of a friend's 540-degree McTwist in the halfpipe. But also -- as happened recently -- a Penn State fraternity can upload Facebook photos of partially naked, sleeping college women. A San Jose homeowner cowers behind a locked door while she watches an intruder stroll through her home on a surveillance video.

Debrief tool used in the experiment displays a video replay of the operator console (similar to this map display), and a timeline of events suggested by AEMASE for discussion during debrief. The tool also includes visualizations of entity movement over time. Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new "smart machine" installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students. Sandia National Laboratories' Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced "amaze") is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators. Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia computer scientist and AEMASE's inventor.

A man arrives at an airport for a flight, and as he goes through security the agent asks some questions. Did anyone help him pack his suitcase? What is the purpose of his trip? During the conversation, the agent enters answers and facial reactions into a computer pre-programmed with millions of pieces of information relating to the behavior of suspicious passengers. Such man-and-machine collaborations, in this instance to detect terrorists, are not yet in place at airports.