Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun and Google engineer Chris Urmson — the brains behind Google’s autonomous vehicle project — explained how the self-driving cars work and showed off videos of successful road tests during a recent keynote at the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco. According to IEEE Spectrum, which has complete coverage of the keynote: Google’s fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now logged more than 190,000 miles (about 300,000 kilometers), driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads with only occasional human intervention. The project is still far from becoming commercially viable, but Google has set up a demonstration system on its campus, using driverless golf […]

A Science Nation story published today describes a public-private partnership funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is attempting to link mind and machine to ultimately improve the living conditions of those with “locked-in syndrome” — a malady in which people with normal cognitive brain activity suffer severe paralysis, often from injuries or an illness such as Lou Gehrig’s disease. From the Science Nation article (see a video after the jump!):

Later this week, five teams from across the country will compete before a blue-ribbon panel of judges — and officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — in the inaugural RoboBowl venture competition. RoboBowl Pittsburgh, as it’s being called (the competition will take place on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh), is the first in a series of next-generation robotics venture competitions co-sponsored by the Robotics Technology Consortium and Innovation Accelerator “to find and foster startup and early-stage companies seeking to develop products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs in targeted industrial sectors.” The emphasis in Pittsburgh will be on next-generation robotics for healthcare. […]

For the past two weeks, the National Mall in Washington, DC, has been transformed into a neighborhood of futuristic homes, with 20 teams from five countries spanning four continents competing in the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Solar Decathlon — an award-winning program that challenges collegiate students from around the world “to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are affordable, highly energy efficient, attractive, and easy to live in.” Late Saturday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the winners — and the team from the University of Maryland took home first place, scoring 951.151 points out of a possible 1,000. The Maryland team’s home — called WaterShed — harvests, recycles, and reuses water, conserving and producing resources with the water […]

There’s a new study out in tomorrow’s Science magazine that’s generating lots of buzz — trending, if you will — this afternoon: researchers have mined two years’ worth of Twitter data, from over 2.4 million users, to study the daily, weekly, and seasonal variations in the mood of people from 84 countries around the world. As one journalist put it: But while the findings aren’t necessarily surprising — and this isn’t the first “Twitter study” either — the fact that the two social scientists mined such a large data set to solve a problem that’s usually reserved for surveys or individual diaries is noteworthy. As the news staff of Science magazine points out in […]

At an event in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) released results of its first Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) — launched earlier this year at the recommendation of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) to help the Department identify a set of priorities for its energy technology R&D activities. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu noted: Traditionally, the Department’s energy strategy has been organized along individual program lines and based on annual budgets. With this QTR, we bind together multiple energy technologies, as well as multiple DoE energy technology programs, in the common purpose of solving our energy challenges. In addition, this QTR provides a multi-year framework […]