quantum leap

The results are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing took the $2 million top prize, Stanford Racing—last year's winner—came in second for $1 million, and Virginia Tech rounded out the top three, pocketing $500,000.

It sounds platitudinous, but every one of the six teams that finished this year's course should be proud of their accomplishment. By situating the race in an urban environment crammed with buildings, four-way stops, and robotic and human traffic, DARPA forced the robot entrants to make a quantum leap in their ability to respond to the unexpected—a crucial skill if their self-driving descendants are ever to take to the streets.—Elizabeth Svoboda

NASA hopes to someday use a robot like Bill Stone's DepthX to explore Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter and one of the most probably places in our solar system to support life.

A Toxic Glow
In July, researchers at Emory University made tumors in rats glow by injecting the rodents with quantum dots, submicroscopic semiconductors that shine when light is beamed at them. The next step: making the dots glow in the infrared spectrum—those wavelengths are easier to see through body tissues than are visible light waves.