We now perform mathematical calculations so often and so effortlessly with digital electronic computers that it's easy to forget that there was ever any other way to compute things. In an earlier era, though, engineers had to devise clever strategies to calculate the solutions they needed using various kinds of analog computers. Some of those early computers were electronic, but many were mechanical, relying on gears, balls and disks, hydraulic pumps and reservoirs, or the like. For some applications, like the processing of synthetic-aperture radar data in the 1960s, the analog computations were done optically. That approach gave way to digital computations as electronic technology improved. Curiously, though, some researchers are once again exploring the use of analog optical computers for a modern-day computational challenge: neural-network calculations.

Here's a question: how does a self-driving car reveal its intentions to you without an audio cue? Humans can gesture when they let you cross the street, but autonomous vehicles don't have that luxury. Ford and Virginia Tech think they have the answer. They're testing a communication method that uses light signals from dedicated strips to indicate what self-driving cars are doing. If a driverless machine is yielding, for example, it could flash two white lights side to side.

Instead, they settled on visual signals from a light bar placed on the windshield of a Ford Transit Van. A solid white light shows the vehicle is in full autonomous mode, a blinking white light indicates acceleration and a pair of white lights moving side to side signals slowing and stopping.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a soft robotic hand with a touch delicate enough to sort tomatoes and find the ripest one. Researchers at Cornell University have developed a soft robotic hand with a touch delicate enough to sort tomatoes and find the ripest one. Robotics researchers at Cornell University made a hand that has something close to a human touch -- it can not only touch delicate items but also sense the shape and texture of what it comes into contact with. Such a soft robot hand is a step forward for the growing field of soft robotics -- the kind of technology that's already used in warehouses to handle food or other products. But it also holds promise for better prosthetics, robots to interact directly with people or with fragile objects, or robots to squeeze into tight spaces.