We have learned more about the human brain in the past five years than in the previous 25. The reason for this dramatic increase comes from the convergence of information being created by two technologies.

Agriculture is facing a crisis. Mass irrigation is turning swaths of fertile ground into salty wastelands. Already a third of the world’s irrigated land has been rendered useless because the soil is too salty for crops to flourish.

Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs given to newborn rats change their sexual behaviour later in life. The drugs interfere with the brain’s sex-specific development, suggesting that they may also affect equivalent mechanisms in humans.

The Toronto based company called Happy Worker has just announced a specialty toy called the “GeekMan Action Figure.”

Evolutionary computing has been tapped to produce coherent robot behavior in simulation, and real robots have been used to evolve simple behavior like moving toward light sources and avoiding objects.