Which is why, after a comet struck Jupiter in 1994, NASA decided to launch a research programme into Near-Earth Objects.

UNESCO: Open Access to Scientific Information

It is not impossible that one or two of these objects may, as research goes on, prove to have come from collections which were the subject of spoliation during the Nazi period.

BBC: Entertainment & Arts

Previous archaeological research has established that there was a thriving trade in metal objects throughout Europe.

FORBES: Ancient Burial Cloth Provides Clues To Bronze Age Trade

While patrolling the halls of the CHI 2013 Human Factors in Computing conference in Paris, we spied a research project from MIT's Media Lab called "Smarter Objects" that turns Minority Report tech on its head.

ENGADGET

Robotic surrogates that offer paralyzed people the freedom to explore their environment, manipulate objects or simply fetch things has been the holy grail of BCI research for a long time.

BBC: The robot that reads your mind to train itself

In fact, in 2009 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored an online game to determine how effective social networks could be in locating objects.

FORBES: The Serious Business of Games