On Tuesday, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially announced the private sector participants in its Transformer X project to build a Humvee that can take off, fly hundreds of miles, and land with little human input.

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We also take a closer look at how the commercial space sector is pushing exploration forward with Google Lunar X Prize senior director, Alexandra Hall, a lunar rover team at Carnegie Mellon, the Space Angels Network VC firm and Laser Motive, which is working on powering crafts through lasers.

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There are several factors that will affect the labour market in 2013 and no doubt the employment sector will undergo various changes, including further redundancies, a softening mining sector, employee expectations shifting, the retirement of Boomers, Gen X moving into senior management roles and Gen Y influencing the workplace.

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In the private sector, rewards can be offered for specific technological achievements, such as what the X Prize Foundation has been doing.

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Other competitors in the basic materials sector include: Steel Dynamics (STLD), AK Steel (AKS), and US Steel (X).

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