Recovering the planet's natural resources is hard. It's difficult, dangerous, and can be environmentally damaging. Cue an IT revolution, with smart communications, 'extreme Wi-Fi' covering vast deserts, autonomous vehicles that extract vital rocks and minerals, and geofenced employees who receive warnings if they get close to a mine's famously colossal big machinery. There's even a'smart bolt' that creates an underground support structure which is classic Internet of Things. The final goal is the autonomous mine, where humans are completely removed from the mining process.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott's 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot's harvesting history. The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer's computer system. With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office. "This is becoming more standard," says Pigott, who grows a rotation of wheat, oilseed, oats, and barley on his farm in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside an hour north of London. German chemical company Bayer cited the growth in such digitally assisted farming as a key reason for its 62 billion bid for Monsanto, which has become a leading provider of analytics used by growers.

Apple's Siri automated assistant, pre-approved credit card offers, saving and investment offers from your bank, suggestions on Amazon, Expedia or Netflix are all examples of machine learning in action. What all these uses have in common is that each looks to create the highest quality prediction possible of future behavior based on history. Machine learning excels at solving complex problems that are predicated on creating accurate predictions.

A private company is aiming to break into the developing asteroid mining business with a concept that could turn the minor planetary objects into rudimentary spacefaring vessels. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Made In Space, Inc., responsible for the first 3D printer to function in zero gravity conditions, will use its additive manufacturing expertise and backing from NASA to continue work on its Project Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata (RAMA). That initiative "turns asteroids into basic spacecraft capable of moving themselves to useful locations in space," according to a blog post by Made In Space co-founder and chief technology officer Jason Dunn. NASA itself is already invested in the further study of the near-Earth objects (NEOs), and even aims to move a portion of an asteroid into Earth's orbit in the near future. And with the once-theoretical asteroid mining business now on its way to becoming an international industry, utilizing the cosmic bodies for the transport and harvesting of resources is now a practical interest.

The unusual shelter has been set up at the V&A Museum in London as part of a new "Engineering Season" that runs until November. It was created by a group from the University of Stuttgart in Germany: Achim Menges, an experimental architect and professor; Jans Knipper, a structural engineer and professor; Moritz Dorstelmann, a research associate and doctoral candidate at the university; and Thomas Auer, a climate engineer. It's called the Elytra Filament Pavilion, and it takes inspiration from the hardened "elytra" wings used by flying beetles. While they're shooting through the air, these insects raise their forewings into a flat, open position, revealing a pair of softer and more powerful sails underneath. "The shell of the flying beetle is a very light structure, because, well, the beetle has to fly," Knipper says.

It's tempting to think of technological advancement in terms of radical new materials or near-magical computer science--for example, the way driverless cars promise to teach artificial intelligence to drive better than humans. But just as often, new technology just makes smarter use of things we already have--for example, the way the novel "diverging diamond" interchange, or DDI, helps keep all-too-human drivers from ramming each other at high speed. By flipping two opposing lanes of traffic under a highway, the DDI design eliminates left-hand turns through opposing traffic. Left-hand turns of this sort, according to a traffic engineer speaking with Wired, are particularly dangerous and inefficient. The DDI design also makes it very hard for drivers to enter ramps going the wrong way, which, believe it or not, is a rather serious problem on the nation's highways.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. "Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools," the Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, "nurse avatars" that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There's even a "guru avatar" in development, designed to teach meditation. These products are exciting and futuristic--just a decade ago, the possibility of conversing with a computer program seemed like science fiction.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. "Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools," the Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, "nurse avatars" that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There's even a "guru avatar" in development, designed to teach meditation. These products are exciting and futuristic--just a decade ago, the possibility of conversing with a computer program seemed like science fiction.

They have been blamed for bringing worldwide destruction to Earth and triggering the kind of mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs. But it appears we may owe our very existence to a comet that smashed into our planet billions of years ago. A spacecraft that has been orbiting a distant comet as it races through the solar system has sent back compelling evidence that suggests one of these icy objects brought the seeds of life to Earth. Comets are often thought of as harbingers of doom, causing mass extinctions and destruction on Earth. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, which has been orbiting the duck-shaped Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko since August 2014, has discovered two key building blocks of life on the enormous block of ice and dust.