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.

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

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.