sebastian thrun

2 PM: "Ladies and gentlemen," the race caller intones, "Junior, the first bot to see the finishing checkered flag!" With spectators standing on the bleachers, hanging over the chainlink fence, and screaming their lungs out, Junior, the Stanford Racing Team's VW Passat, crosses the finish line. After finishing its long, hard slog, the car sits still and silent in the middle of the track for a minute, as if nonplussed by its feat. A moment later, Carnegie Mellon's Boss bot zips past the finishing flag, followed closely by Virginia Tech's Odin. The three other bots on the course are still chugging away.

Two years ago, when Stanford's Stanley bot was first to enter the finishers' circle, Stanford team members instantly erupted with joy and emotion, jumping into the car for a honk-filled victory lap and dumping Gatorade over the head of their fearless leader, Sebastian Thrun. There's no such revelry this time around, possibly because the results aren't so self-evident. All three teams know that final score calculations still have to be made and that the close finish means any of them could take the top prize.

Though the anti-climactic finish Whitaker predicted has come to pass, members of the finishing teams are still basking in the afterglow. "This is an unbelievable day," says Thrun. "The fact that three vehicles came back already shows that we've made tremendous progress." OK, so it's not "We have a winner," but it's something. Check back tomorrow for the race's final results.—Elizabeth Svoboda

People don't usually become scientists expecting fame, glory or to have a line of sneakers named after them. But we at Popular Science believe that scientists are the true celebrities of our time. Their contributions enhance our lives and stretch our imaginations. For the fourth year running, we conducted a rigorous search to identify some of the most dynamic, promising young researchers at institutions around North America.

We sought nominations from university department heads, the organizations that award prizes for scientific merit, and the editors of prestigious journals.

Sebastian Thrun isn't watching the road when his driverless Volkswagen SUV veers off-course and heads for a 50-foot precipice. He's in the backseat looking at a laptop that's tracking the car's brain, which consists of seven Pentium processors. When he feels the car swerve abruptly to the left, Thrun looks up, pushes aside a bundle of cables blocking his view, and realizes that his car is about to pull a Thelma and Louise.

In this, the fourth of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous-vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday, October 8, near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at Stanford's entry, affectionately dubbed Stanley, which is designed to automatically choose the best route. Stay tuned to popsci.com for more previews throughout the week and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

Many of PopSci's Brilliant 10-scientists who are pushing the limits of their disciplines-labor in abstract realms, generating calculations, analyses and other intangibles. But a couple of them work very much in the here and now, even risking their own safety when necessary.

Maydianne Andrade, 35, a biologist at the University of Toronto, studies the mating habits of Australian redback spiders, and keeps hundreds of these poisonous critters in her lab. She and her colleagues made the following video, which shows a pair of redbacks in flagrante.