This has to be one of the most surreal, psychedelic and fun forms of public transport. The Tunnel connects East Nanjin Rd on the Bund, and Pudong near the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, running under the Huangpu river in Shanghai, China. It's a psychedelic trip in a glass capsule along the 647-meter flashing, strobing tunnel.

Popcorn Popping

The US Navy's cutting-edge robot fighter plane aims to be the first unmanned aerial vehicle to take-off and land at sea. Tests have been carried out to see whether military drones can mix safely in the air with passenger planes.

As a fighter plane prepares to take off from a naval carrier at sea, the pilot and deck crew go through a tightly choreographed series of hand signals to tell each other they are ready to launch. It ends with a final "salute" from the pilot to indicate that the aircraft is ready to be catapulted off the deck. But when the X-47B, the US Navy's newest prototype combat aircraft, prepares for its first carrier launch early next year, there will be no salute. That's because there will also be no pilot.

Iron Dome is a mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. It was designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of 4 to 70 kilometers away and whose trajectory would take them to a populated area.

The system, created as a defensive countermeasure to the rocket threat against Israel's civilian population on its northern and southern borders, uses technology first employed in Rafael's SPYDER system. Iron Dome was declared operational and initially deployed on 27 March 2011 near Beersheba.  On 10 March 2012, The Jerusalem Post reported that the system shot down 90% of rockets launched from Gaza it fired at (rockets which will land in unpopulated areas are ignored). By November 2012, it had intercepted and disabled more than 400 rockets.

Apple's iPhone and its rivals may have introduced touchscreens to the masses, but now a raft of technologies promise to change the way we interact with computers forever.

It is a similar story with computers. Take Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system, due to be launched by the end of 2012. Its colourful, tile-laden start screen may look startlingly different to older versions of Windows, but beneath the eye candy it's still heavily reliant on the keyboard and mouse. In fact, with one or two notable exceptions, it is striking just how little the way we interact with computers has changed in the last few decades. "The keyboard and mouse are certainly a hard act to follow," says George Fitzmaurice, head of user interface research for US software maker Autodesk. But, despite an apparent lack of apparent novelty in the majority of interfaces of today's mass market devices, there are plenty of ideas in the pipeline.