High-tech options include adaptive cruise control, rear parking assist with cross-path detection and a lane departure system that not only alerts you if the vehicle drifts out of the lane, but gently guides you back between the lane markers.

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Throw it, and its motor engages, setting it to fly a pre-programmed route or a path guided by remote control.

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Dr Lin is already testing a waveguide designed to steer light with a wavelength of 1.5 microns, and he is also working on three-dimensional waveguides made of silicon, which will provide almost total control over the path the light takes, and make really complex optical circuits possible.

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Mr Halliday steers an informed path between the myth of pervasive external control, trumpeted in fundamentalist rhetoric and anti-imperialist literature, and the illusion of a ring-fenced Middle Eastern independence.

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