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The Space Shuttle Discovery left the International Space Station this morning for the last time. To commemorate the ship's accomplishments over 27 years of service, the crew was greeted to a morning wake-up message from Capt. Kirk. "Space, the final frontier," Shatner said in a prerecorded message. "These have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery. Her 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together on the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before."

Neural networks -- collections of artificial neurons or nodes set up to behave like the neurons in the brain -- can be trained to carry out a variety of tasks, often having something to do with pattern or sequence recognition. As such, they have shown great promise in image recognition systems. Now, research coming out of the University of Hong Kong has shown that neural networks can hear as well as see. A neural network there has learned the features of sound, classifying songs into specific genres with 87 percent accuracy.

Similar networks based on auditory cortexes have been rewired for vision, so it would appear these kinds of neural networks are quite flexible in their functions. As such, it seems they could potentially be applied to all sorts of perceptual tasks in artificial intelligence systems, the possibilities of which have only begun to be explored.

A statistical-physics-based model may shed light on the age-old question "how can morality take root in a world where everyone is out for themselves?" Computer simulations by an international team of scientists suggest that the answer lies in how people interact with their closest neighbours rather than with the population as a whole.