Climbing teams spent over two weeks laser scanning Mount Rushmore in May 2010. High atop the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a layer of biofilm covering the dome, darkening and discoloring it. Biofilm is "a colony of microscopic organisms that adheres to stone surfaces," according to the U.S. National Park Service, which needed to get a handle on its magnitude to get an accurate cost estimate for the work to remove it. Enter CyArk, a non-profit organization that uses three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning and photogrammetry to digitally record and archive some of the world's most significant cultural artifacts and structures. CyArk spent a week covering "every inch" of the dome, processed the data, and returned a set of engineering drawings to the Park Service "to quantify down to the square inch how much biofilm is on the monument," says CEO John Ristevski.

If you drive for a living, you're likely worried about what self-driving technology will do to your livelihood, and for good reason. But if you're a "can't-beat-'em-join'-em" type, and figure you might as well make a few bucks helping ease the inevitable into existence, just download Payver. It's an app that pays you a few pennies for every mile you drive, if you're willing to point your phone's camera at the road and share what it records. Payver is the work of Lvl5, a new startup focused on building the maps self-driving cars will need to navigate safely. Detailed, digital maps are widely considered an essential addition to the sensors these vehicles carry, an extra source of information to complement the cameras, radars, and lidars scanning the road.

You punch the destination into your phone and a driverless car soon swings to a stop next to you. You jump in and it whisks you north-west towards the I-80 on-ramp. But as you merge with the highway traffic, the car pipes up: "This car runs on the Uber network, which does not cover Detroit. You will be dropped at an appropriate interchange point." The way things are going, this could be the short-term prospect for driverless cars.