The authors of the 25 best papers will be invited to participate in the three-week design workshop at ESA's research and technology centre (ESTEC). During the workshop they will create a preliminary design of a UAV for Mars with the assistance of specialists from the industry and other institutions. Selected participants will be hosted at no cost.

"Clearly, climate change is going to have a major impact on our ability to grow rice," Robert S. Zeigler, IRRI director general, said. "We can't afford to sit back and be complacent about this because rice production feeds almost half the world's population while providing vital employment to millions as well, with most of them being very poor and vulnerable."

For these reasons, Dr. Zeigler announced at the workshop that IRRI – in an unprecedented move – was ready to put up US$2 million of its own research funds as part of an effort to raise $20–25 million for a major five-year project to mitigate the effects of climate change on rice production. "We need to start developing rice varieties that can tolerate higher temperatures and other aspects of climate change right now," he said.

Scenario planning is a method for learning about the future by understanding the nature and impact of the most uncertain and important driving forces affecting our future. It is a group process which encourages knowledge exchange and development of mutual deeper understanding of central issues important to the future of your business. The goal is to craft a number of diverging stories by extrapolating uncertain and heavily influencing driving forces. The stories together with the work getting there has the dual purpose of increasing the knowledge of the business environment and widen both the receiver's and participant's perception of possible future events.

Instead of painstakingly collecting their own data, researchers will be able to mine up-to-the-minute databases on every aspect of the environment — the understanding of diseases, and the efficacy of treatments will be dissected by ceaselessly monitoring huge clinical populations. "It will be a very different way of thinking, sifting through the data to find patterns," says Borriello, who works on integrating medical sensors — such as continuous monitors of heart rate and blood oxygen — with their surroundings. "There will be a much more rapid cycle of hypothesis generation and testing than we have now."

All this points to ways that science might exploit the Internet in the near future. Beyond that, we know that hardware will continue to improve. In 15 years, we are likely to have processing power that is 1,000 times greater than today, and an even larger increase in the number of network-connected devices (such as tiny sensors and effectors). Among other things, these improvements will add a layer of networking beneath what we have today, to create a world come alive with trillions of tiny devices that know what they are, where they are and how to communicate with their near neighbours, and thus, with anything in the world. Much of the planetary sensing that is part of the scientific enterprise will be implicit in this new digital Gaia. The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.

...science is becoming less reductionist and more integrative, as researchers attempt to study the collective behaviour of larger systems. To quote Richard Dawkins: "If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology."

Such system-level approaches are emerging in fields as diverse as biology, climate and seismology. A frequent goal is to develop high-fidelity computer simulations as tools for studying system-level behaviour. Computer science, as the 'science of complexity', has much to say about how such simulations — which can be considered a new class of experimental apparatus — should be constructed, and how their output should be analysed and compared with experiment. Similarly, information theory provides formidable insight into how biological systems encode, transform and transmit information.

Happily, there is considerable interest in wanting to build one element of biological semantics — the passage of time — into information theory. Formalizations of information processing that embodied this and other semantic concepts relevant to biology might help biologists to go beyond quantifying reaction rates and molecular species of biological systems to understand their dynamic behaviour. They might also help to suggest new experiments — perhaps on synthetic biological systems engineered to have a crisper division between process and output, which could then be evolved by artificial selection. This approach might bring a deeper understanding of function at its most fundamental level of fitness and selection.

Today's generation of microfluidic machines is designed to carry out a specific series of chemical reactions, but further flexibility could be added to this tool kit by developing what one might call a 'chemical Turing machine'. [...] Just as Turing's original machine later formed the theoretical basis of modern computation, so the programmability of a chemical Turing machine would allow a degree of flexibility far beyond the present robot-scientist experiments, including complex iterative behaviour.

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