Four articles for the month of May 2013. One of them however is about a story in the realm of mathematics so arguably isn’t much of a science article at all.

• Older computer users will probably remember the ELIZA chat bot written in the 1960s. It was created only as a early demonstration of natural language processing but many people took it seriously as a virtual psychotherapist. This article from the BBC talks about a real attempt at creating a virtual therapist to help real humans. As such it goes much farther than just printing text output onto a screen. It has an onscreen avatar which it can control, can verbalize its responses, can listen to patients’ voices and observer their body language and so forth.
• So many claims of success at achieving cold fusion have been refuted over the years that many people now think it is impossible. This article from ExtremeTech covers the latest such claim and given the secrecy involved, it seems likely that it is just another scam. In this case however, a number of scientists from reputable European universities have been allowed to study the device, though they are still being kept in the dark about how exactly it works, and their preliminary, non-peer reviewed, finding is that it works as advertised. Given the potency of cold fusion as a power source, which would allow it to completely supplant our currently fossil-fuel based energy economy, this is something that deserves a lot of attention.
• The next article from the so-called smart rifle. It comes with a color graphics display that allows the user to lock on to a target. The rifle then uses its own suite of sensors to determine when exactly to open fire, taking into account factors such as wind and distance, to ensure a hit. It even comes with Wi-Fi so the data for every shot can be shared online.
• Finally here’s an extensive article describing the excitement in the mathematical community surrounding the release of a series of papers by a Japanese mathematician in August 2012. The mathematician in question Shinichi Mochizuki posted the papers onto the Internet claiming that it was a proof of the ABC Conjecture, a number theory problem that has important ramifications for mathematicians, and for all intents and purposes simply walked away, refusing all media interviews and requests to field questions. Other mathematicians of course delved eagerly into the papers, but there are 512 pages in total, and those were filled with new mathematical concepts and constructs that Mochizuki had seemingly invented himself. This meant that no other mathematician has so far been able to verify the correctness of his proof and so many months later the entire community is still waiting with bated breath to see if the proof is correct.