From robots that eat and shrink to invincible soldiers and smart drones, advanced science projects will alter our universe. We look at 12 of the best.
The robotic gardener
Home to lots of unconventional thinking, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is experimenting with robotic gardening or "precision agriculture" as the MIT folks call it.
The idea is to take advantage of swarm robotics: and plant sensors that let plants request additional water from their robot overlords. Ripe tomatoes for example, are picked by other bots.
The dark side
The US National Science Foundation is developing mathematical and computational algorithms and techniques that will improve law enforcement and the intelligence communities' ability to transform large, often streaming data sets, emails, images, numbers and sounds into a form that better supports visualisation and analytic reasoning.
The potentially controversial dark side of this research is that the NSF is working hand-in-hand with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop some of this technology.
Obviously interpreting data from potential terrorist organisations and the like would be useful but when you see mention of healthcare and biological data interpretation interest in the same sentence as DHS, it does create a bit of an issue.
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