This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Imagine a computer that could sift through millions of financial transactions in real time to detect fraud or look for signs of insider trading, and do it exponentially faster than the most powerful computers in the world today. A Washington start-up is betting that such a machine can be built in the not-too-distant future, using the mysterious principles of quantum computing. QxBranch (pronounced Q-Branch) is the latest project by Michael Brett, an Australian entrepreneur whose previous venture, Aerospace Concepts, teamed up with Lockheed Martin last year to explore the futuristic realm of super-fast quantum computers. QxBranch -- a spinoff from Aerospace Concepts -- was born out of that collaboration and develops and tests commercial applications for quantum computing. The company has Lockheed's recently retired chief technology officer, Ray Johnson, on its board of directors.

It is difficult to determine exactly how much money is going into research at universities because government contracts also go to corporations, such as Boeing, that work closely with schools like Carnegie Mellon. Northrop Grumman Corp., Intel Corp. are among other companies that have sponsored university research or maintain their own robotics projects.

"Everyone is trying to see if they can catch the fraud before the check goes out the door," says Andrea Allmon, director of health care operations at Fair Isaac, a firm known for its credit card scoring model that also sells health fraud detection computer systems. That's because companies can save far more money by stopping claims before they are paid than trying to get fraudsters to pay back money. Insurer Aetna says its new computer software helped it stop $89 million in payments before they reached medical providers last year. That compares with the $15 million in fraud repayments it was able to collect after the fact. But many states require medical claims to be paid promptly, which means insurers must be able to review claims, spot problems and do investigations very quickly.

The regulator said: "We agree with Google its [self-driving car] will not have a'driver' in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years." Google's self-driving car just got a boost from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. SAN FRANCISCO - Google's pioneering effort to develop a self-driving vehicle devoid of steering wheel and pedals just got a boost from the feds. In a Feb. 4 letter to Google Car project director Chris Urmson that was first reported by Reuters, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noted it "will interpret'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants," adding that "we agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a'driver' in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years." Google's seven-year-old program has evolved from a fleet of radar- and laser-packed Lexus SUVs to now include a small two-passenger vehicle whose ultimate design will not allow passengers to drive the car.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is putting its search engine in the hands of its artificial intelligence chief. John Giannandrea will take over from Amit Singhal who is leaving Google this month after 15 years. The move shows the ascendance and growing importance of artificial intelligence at the major Silicon Valley technology companies. Search is the engine that drives Google's lucrative advertising business. Artificial intelligence is increasingly behind advances in how Google answers search queries.

A self-driving Lexus SUV owned by Google's parent company Alphabet struck a bus February 14 while it was testing on the streets of Mountain View, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO -- The FBI-Apple encryption battle is just the beginning of an important debate this country needs to have about what to do when U.S. innovation outpaces American law. The FBI's failure to get data it wanted from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists -- despite significant help from Apple -- shows that time has arrived once again. As with the coming of the telephone, the car, the radio and TV, the spread of the mobile Internet has gotten ahead of case law. In this case, with hand-held smartphones now ubiquitous, a consumer technology has outstripped the ability of the government to complete an important terrorist investigation.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon could be able to listen in on voice communications in difficult environments and then quickly translate and transcribe them for use by intelligence analysts and combat troops by 2017, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Newly released DARPA documents show it is continuing the next two stages of its Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech program, which is aimed at separating speech from background noise, determining which language is being spoken and then isolating key words from that speech for analysis. The Air Force, DARPA says, is testing the third phase of the program in the field now, while "the research division of a government agency will be testing the speech activity detection algorithm to incorporate into their platform." References to "a government agency" usually refer to a part of the intelligence community, such as the CIA or National Security Agency. So far, DARPA has spent $13 million on RATS.

Google's self-driving car makes strides. This technology reporter got a chance to ride in the car and says it drives quite conservatively. IOWA CITY, Iowa -- An eastern Iowa county is one of the first across the USA to open its arms to driverless cars. Johnson County supervisors said Thursday they want the county on the forefront of research into autonomous vehicles, so they are allowing them on county streets. The cities of Coralville, Iowa City and North Liberty are expected to follow with their own resolutions.

Today, mathematics and computer science often appear as the province of geniuses working at the very edge of human ability and imagination. Even as American high schools struggle to employ qualified math and science teachers, American popular culture has embraced math, science, and computers as a mystic realm of extraordinary intellectual power, even verging on madness. Movies like A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, and Pi all present human intelligence in the esoteric symbolism of long, indecipherable, but visually captivating equations. One has to think of such prosaic activities as paying the mortgage and grocery shopping to be reminded of the quiet and non-revelatory quality of rudimentary arithmetic. Which is not to put such labor down.