If two junior Navy officers have their way, the warships of the future will be floating factories that create everything from food to robots and spare parts -- all thanks to 3-D printers. Shipyards will use them on a vast scale. And when the ships need more raw materials, they'll link up with "biomining" ships that harvest raw materials from the sea. Writing in Proceedings, the influential journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, the pair write that the growth of 3-D printing machines could change almost everything about how the Navy builds stuff "through the design and construction of ships, submarines, aircraft, and everything carried on board." On a smaller scale, they write that 3-D printers could change the way the Navy handles logistics and the way it produces tools, components and supplies for its ships.

SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon spacecraft into orbit Sunday night despite losing an engine shortly after lift off. The launch occurred at 8:35 p.m. EDT and was first time a Falcon 9 rocket has flown without a delay on the first scheduled launch time. But while the rocket was climbing through the atmosphere, SpaceX did experience an engine failure. It appears that one of the nine Merlin engines exploded, but SpaceX is saying that is not the case. The flight continued and, as designed, the other eight engines were more than enough to deliver the Dragon spacecraft to its proper orbit. "Falcon 9 did exactly what it was designed to do," SpaceX said in a statement.

On a giant flat-screen TV in an old Emeryville, California warehouse, a floating orb fires red, blue, pink, and yellow beams into a honeycomb of hexagonal blocks. The blocks are black, white, and gray, but as the beams hit them, they change--flashing, fading, absorbing color. And when they do, scores tally just above. On the same screen, from adjacent windows, three commentators provide additional color, as if this was a videogame championship. "You can see who's being owned, and who's doing the owning," says one, a theoretical physicist named Hakeem Oluseyi. The other two commentators are veteran white-hat hackers, experts at reverse-engineering software in search of security holes.

While Google was building an artificial intelligence that could beat a grandmaster at the ancient game of Go, University of Cincinnati alum took a different tack. They designed an AI that could take on a fighter pilot. Dubbed ALPHA, this system recently beat retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in multiple flight simulator trials, as the researchers explain in a paper recently published in the Journal of Defense Management. The idea isn't to replace human fighter pilots. According to Nicholas Ernest, a University of Cincinnati alum and the founder of Psibernetix, the company that developed ALPHA, this AI may ultimately act as a kind of digital assistant that provides real-time advice to pilots.

More fallout this week from the Edward Snowden leaks two years ago: the US Second Court of Appeals ruled May 7th that the NSA's mass phone surveillance is illegal, but did not issue an injunction to stop the Agency's bulk data collection. Meanwhile, many of us knowingly give up privacy online for digital convenience. As the concept of privacy continues to evolve, leading technologists and thinkers debate what privacy means and how much should we want and expect. VIDEO: Clockwise from left: voice-recognition pioneer Janet Baker, co-founder of Dragon Systems; Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO, Second Spectrum, a data software company that's helping NBA teams up their game; Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of predictably insightful books like Predictably Irrational; Polymath industrial designer Yves Behar, Founder, fuseproject; Chief Creative Officer, Jawbone; COO, August; Ali Kashani, Founder and CTO, Neurio, an Internet of Things start-up that is monitoring your house; Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab, is teaching computers to see; and Rodney Brooks, Founder and CTO, Rethink Robotics and Co-founder of iRobot, is concerned that Google knows every move he makes but is tempted by their tools nonetheless.

The deactivated dangling thing looks like a metal rag doll, vulnerable and grotesque. But this is Atlas, one of the most sophisticated robots in the world. "The control system for a fighter jet is way simpler than this," says Tedrake, leader of the Atlas team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As one of the Darpa Robotics Challenge's 25 robot finalists, Atlas will be representing Tedrake's team at the 2015 challenge in Pomona, California in two weeks. Its purpose in life--along with the other finalists--is to be the best search-and-rescue robot possible. In terrain too dangerous for humans to traverse, a robot that can lift hundreds of pounds and work power tools could save lives without endangering others.

Clearpath Robotics was founded six years ago by three college buddies with a passion for building stuff. Its 80 employees specialize in all-terrain test rigs like the Husky, a stout four-wheeled robot vehicle used by researchers within the Department of Defense. They make drones too, and have even built a robotic boat called the Kingfisher. But there is one thing they will never, ever build: a robot that can kill. Clearpath is the first and, so far as we can tell, only robotics company to pledge not to build killer robots.

Humans have launched thousands of satellites into orbit, many of which are now useless and dangerously in the way of future space missions. NASA wants this space junk cleared out, but many pieces are spinning so wildly that they would be dangerous to collect. To solve this problem, a team from MIT has come up with an algorithm that could let cleanup crews measure a target's movement so they can plan an approach to safely snatch it up. The team sent their algorithm up to the International Space Station, where astronauts tested it using two SPHERES satellites, volleyball-sized bots being tested as swarming space helpers. As one satellite floated and spun, another filmed the action using a pair of linked cameras, spaced slightly apart.

The silver, three-wheeled RAVEN moon rover is the size of a golf cart, weighs 800 pounds, and is powered by two super-size car batteries. Its "brain" is the same kind of computer processor found in a netbook. Students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering's Space Systems Laboratory built the rover, which won a NASA design competition. As a smart, mobile assistant for astronauts, the rover and its robotic arm theoretically could follow instructions to bore holes into the moon's surface, collect rock samples and even carry an astronaut to safety in an emergency. Space systems lab students also designed a companion spacesuit to allow an astronaut to give the rover voice and keypad commands remotely.

Dr. Hodes was at the forefront of computer-related research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institutes of Health. While working toward his doctorate in mathematic logic at MIT from 1957 to 1962, he studied under two founders of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. Dr. Hodes was a member of the artificial intelligence group of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics and did pioneering work in the development of the computer programming language LISP, which was used in artificial intelligence research. He also is credited with being one of the first people to recognize that logic could be used as a programming language. In 1966, Dr. Hodes joined NIH and worked in the artificial intelligence laboratory before moving to the National Cancer Institute.