Duke University engineers think they've made an important step towards developing robotic surgeons that operate independently. The robot they used in their experiments—which were just feasibility studies, and were not performed on real people—uses 3-D ultrasound as its eyes, and an AI program that processes the 3-D information it gathers to determine the robot's next steps.

Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed the Burmese coast with 130 mph winds and bursts of up to 160 mph—the equivalent of a category 3 or low-level category 4 hurricane. It reportedly led to thousands of deaths, and as of Monday, thousands more were missing. Now NASA has released a set of images that show how drastically the flooding has drenched Burma's coast.

Scientists have shown off a new laser that boasts an incomparable mix of speed, short pulses and power. That's newsworthy in and of itself, but this laser, developed by researchers at the University of Konstanz in Germany and, here in the U.S., at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, could also lead to a 100-fold increase in the sensitivity of observatories searching for extrasolar planets. The laser itself is the size of a dime, and pops out 10 billion pulses per second with an average power of 650 milliwatts.

Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

NASA has been catching some extra criticism in the past few days after The Houston Chronicle—Johnson Space Center's hometown paper—ran an expose on credit card abuses at the agency.

The paper reportedly reviewed 451,000 transactions, and among plenty of apparently legitimate purchases, found that NASA employees had also bought iPods, video games and jewelry. The first two you might be able to slide past accounting, if you were, say, an astronaut doing isolation chamber testing, and needed a few gadgets and games to pass the time.

Yes, it ended well, but the rough-and-tumble landing that astronauts experienced recently as a Soyuz capsule on its way back from the International Space Station missed its landing target by 300 miles sure doesn't sound like something you'd want to do twice.

Nokia indicated today that it intends to release a bunch of new phones through U.S. carriers in the next few months. The Finnish manufacturer sells 40 percent of the mobiles worldwide, but only accounts for about 10 percent of the U.S. market. But a daily paper in Finland quoted a Nokia chief designed as saying that the company plans to ramp up its U.S. presence.

Australian artist Chris Poole was driving around his native Perth recently, when some curbside garbage caught his eye. Unlike the average scavenger, Poole wasn’t searching for couches or chairs. He had his eye on an old slide viewer—a key component for his next project, a laser-based projector that could display family photos (albeit with a green hue) to the entire town.

Alan Gevins and his team at SAM Technology in San Francisco are nearing the end of a large study analyzing the effects of various drugs on cognitive performance. An editor at Technology Review recently visited their offices, and downed a stiff cocktail, to experience their work first-hand.

In an auction battle between two odd items yesterday at Bonhams New York, a few fossilized pieces of 130-million-year-old dinosaur dung sold for nearly one thousand dollars, but a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite didn't find any takers.