Humans have a lot to think about and even more to process when it comes to solving the problems we face. Somewhere in all the data we churn out is everything from a HIV cure to the perfect videogame character. Computers with narrowly-programmed parameters have the speed but not the creativity to find what we need amid messy abstracts

But it’s not just the large clear picture of your flight path the iPhone or iPod Touch can provide. Instead of struggling with a complicated remote control unit, you fly the AR Drone merely by tilting your handheld device in the direction you want to go. There are a few basic touchscreen controls like rise, down and rotate, but the accelerometers inside do the rest.

NASA managed to re-establish contact in the final days to adjust Skylab’s angle for as smooth a re-entry as possible, and final calculations predicted a trajectory across the Southern Ocean and a sparsely populated tract of Western Australia.