"...BMW is testing a 5 series sedan equipped with advanced autonomous technology..."

"The system uses a combination of radar, LIDAR, ultrasound, video and highly detailed GPS maps to sense the vehicle’s own position in relation to its surroundings, including oncoming traffic."
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/08/bmw-tests-an-autonomous-vehicle/ 

"What do you get when you cross a dj with a Canadian roboticist? An almost true-to-fiction Wall-E, that's what."

"For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab..."

 …

"It seems impossible, but apparently nobody has ever made a chocolate-laying 3-D printer before now. Thankfully, that oversight has been remedied by Dr Liang Hao and his team, of the University of Exeter in England..."

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/07/chocolate-3-d-printer-arrives-at-last/

"(PhysOrg.com) -- Two professors from the University of Illinois; one specializing in materials science, the other in electrical engineering, have combined their talents to take the idea of printing circuits onto non-standard materials one step further by developing a conductive ink that can be used in a traditional rollerball ink pen to draw circuits by hand onto paper and other porous materials. In their paper published in Advanced Materials, team leads Jennifer Lewis, Jennifer Bernhard and colleagues describe how they were able to make a type of ink from silver nanoparticles that would remain a liquid while in the pen, but would dry like regular ink once applied. The pen could was then used to draw a functioning LCD display and an antenna."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-rollerball-pen-ink-circuits.html