"You realize there are times - very rarely, once every few years - when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don't want to do that," said Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers' electrical use - if necessary, involuntarily - could avoid that, Rosenfeld said. "If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain," he said, "there's a lot less pain to go around."

While the proposals have received little attention in California, the Internet and talk radio are abuzz with indignation at the idea.

The radio-controlled thermostat is not a new technology, though it is constantly being tweaked; the latest iterations were on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Pacific Gas and Electric, the major utility in Northern California, already has a pilot program in Stockton that allows customers to choose to have their air-conditioning systems attached to a radio-controlled device to reduce use during periods when electricity rates are at their peak. But the idea that a government would mandate use of these devices and reserve the power to override a building owner's wishes galls some people.

"This is an outrage," one Californian said in an e-mail message to Rosenfeld. "We need to build new facilities to handle the growth in this state, not become Big Brother to the citizens of California."

In the future, it may be possible to mimic someone's voice exactly after recording just one sentence.

Such technologies would pose a danger if it were not possible to verify who was speaking, researchers believe.

Scientists were predicting the future at the British Association (BA) Festival of Science in York.

Dr David Howard from the University of York said: "The reason things are changing is because no longer are we using an acoustic model proposed in the 1950s."

Military and police trainees strap the five-pound battery-powered device around their midsections, step into a room lined with video screens, and plunge into realistic combat scenarios. When a trainee gets "shot" or otherwise injured, Threat-Fire zaps him. At the lowest setting, the shock feels like a rubber band snapped hard against the skin, says VirTra president Bob Ferris. The highest setting knocks trainees to the floor and incapacitates them; VirTra says they recover, no lasting harm done, within a few minutes. "If you've ever seen Star Wars, when the emperor shoots lightning bolts at Luke Skywalker-that's what it's like," says Ferris.

Ferris claims the realism of VirTra helps prepare trainees to cope with sometimes lethal stress responses like "tunnel vision," a natural tendency to ignore potential threats in the periphery. The Army agrees. "We want the trainee to be able to concentrate and function and fight through that pain and try to see a scenario out to a conclusion," says Doug West, a firearms instructor at Fort Hood, Texas, which has purchased six belts so far.

"What has been achieved at Sony shows that the technology gives the robot the ability to develop its own language with which to describe its environment and interact with other AIBOs. It sees a ball and it can tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it," Nolfi said.

The most important aspect is how it learns to communicate and interact. Whereas humans use the word 'ball' to refer to a ball, the AIBO dogs start from scratch to develop common agreement on a word to use to refer the ball. They also develop the language structures to express, for instance, that the ball is rolling to the left. The researchers achieved this through instilling their robots with a sense of 'curiosity.'

Initially programmed to recognise stimuli from their sensors, the AIBOs learnt to distinguish between objects and how to interact with them over the course of several hours or days. The curiosity system, or 'metabrain,' continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of children.

Also like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.

"The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space," Duke University's David Smith, one of Pendry's co-authors, explained in a news release. "All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space."

Pendry told MSNBC.com that the cloak wouldn't reflect any light, and wouldn't cast a shadow either. "It would be like Peter Pan had lost his shadow," he said, referring to the fictional character who had to have his shadow stitched back on.

Dreams come true, with a few catches
Theoretically at least, the metamaterial could work like the helmet of invisibility celebrated in Greek myth, or the cloaking device that hid Romulan and Klingon vessels in the "Star Trek" series, or the invisibility cloak that came in so handy for Harry Potter in J.K. Rowlings' novels.

"Fiction has predicted the course of science for some time. ... Maybe these Harry Potter novels were ahead of their time," Pendry said, half-jokingly.

Battery manufacturers know there's no new magic to be discovered that will instantly double battery capacity. The operating principles of the chemical systems that make batteries work are well understood and have been for decades. The issue for the industry is refinement. The last great development in chemistry, the lithium polymer cell, after ten years remains an unfulfilled promise because neither computer-makers nor battery-makers have yet fully exploited its potential for squeezing extra power into odd shapes.

If any breakthrough looms on the horizon, it's the battery-like power system that's not really a battery -- the fuel cell. For decades, fuel cells have percolated on the edges of awareness for engineers and scientists. They were mere curiosities that created power via chemical methods more efficiently than any other means. But they were too exotic and expensive (and big) to be considered for consumer applications. In the next few years, however, several manufacturers hope to have you toting fuel cell-power computers and cell phones that will run all day -- or several days -- without recharging or attention.

In Israel, scientists have created the world's smallest computer by engineering DNA to carry out mathematical functions.

J. Craig Venter, the entrepreneurial scientist who mapped the human genome, announced last month that he intends to string together genes to create from scratch novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ethanol.

With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are creating a new malaria drug by removing genetic material of the E. coli bacterium and replacing it with genes from wormwood and yeast.

For example, national security experts and even synthetic biologists themselves fret that rogue scientists or "biohackers'' could create new biological weapons -- like deadly viruses that lack natural foes. They also worry about innocent mistakes -- organisms that could potentially create havoc if allowed to reproduce outside the lab.

In the future, ads will pop up in our cereal bowls
Our dreams will be interrupted by commercials
But we'll still look to magazines when we don't want to be found.

Conventional brush bristles, made of animal hairs, synthetic polymer fibers, and metal wires, are flimsy and prone to breaking down at the nano-scale, researchers say.

To work at the nano-scale, researchers realized that a different kind of material was needed.

"It dawned on us that [carbon] nanotubes would make excellent bristle material," Pulickel Ajayan, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, said in an e-mail to National Geographic News.

Ajayan has worked with carbon nanotubes—or cylinders of carbon molecules—for more than a decade. Their small size, strength, elasticity, and ability to conduct electricity make them ideal bristle material at the nano-scale, he says.

These robots were programmed to stop after two generations, because we wanted to show just a proof of concept. Also, they cannot reproduce without a supply of power and more cubes provided at the right place and at the right time, so they are fairly constrained and under control. So there is no danger they will "take over the world". Other forms of artificial self-replication can be more concerning - computer viruses and genetically modified crops, for example, are less controllable. Ray Kurzweil has an interesting discussion on the Ethics and concerns of self-replication technologies.

Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We're living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment -- the Singularity -- the world will be as different from today,s world as this one is from the Stone Age.

The pair showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focusing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing.

Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person. What is more, when two sets of lines were superimposed and the subjects were asked to focus on one set, the researchers could work out which one they were thinking of from the brain images.