Have you heard of the kid who played Space Invaders using only his brain? No, this isn't an opening for a lame joke. According to Live Science, with the help of a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger.

The kid already had grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, and those same grids were linked to the videogame. He was then asked to move his hands, talk, and imagine things. These movements were then correlated by researchers to the different signals fired by the brain. They then asked the boy to play Space Invaders by moving his hand and tongue and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.

"He cleared out the whole Level One basically on brain control," said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. "He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination."

Leuthardt and colleagues actually performed this research on four adults a couple of years ago. The team observed quicker reaction times in the boy compared to the adults, along with a higher level of detail control. Chalk that one up to time spent playing videogames. If you're interested, you can check out a vid of the research here.

The Mars rover Opportunity, NASA's "other main man" on Mars, is about to reach the rim of the crater known as Victoria. The crater, which is approximately half a mile wide and 230 feet deep, is one of Opportunity's major stop-overs on the Red Planet. The crater is named after one of the five ships of Ferdinand Magellan and the first ship to circumnavigate the Blue Planet.

"Victoria has been our destination for more than half the mission," said Ray Arvidson of St. Louis's Washington University, the deputy principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit, another rover. "Examination of the rocks exposed in the walls of the crater will greatly increase our understanding of past conditions on Mars and the role of water."

NASA described the two rovers' accomplishments as equivalent to 10 prime missions. While the space agency could not predict the lifespan of Opportunity and Spirit, they have said that they intend to get the best possible data out of the rovers for as long as possible.

The rovers, which NASA considers as national treasures, have been on Mars since January 2004.

Seems that humans aren't the only ones to suffer ailments like stiff shoulders, easily broken limbs and dimming eyesight as they get older.

As winter descends upon Mars' Southern Hemisphere, NASA's rovers appear to be entering the winter of their lives as well, suffering from problems stemming from aging hardware. Nonetheless, they're continuing to make new discoveries about the Red Planet.

Spirit, stationed about 15° south of Mars' equator (roughly equivalent to northern Brazil and central Africa on Earth), is starting to slow down because it's receiving less sunlight. Opportunity is closer to the equator, so experiences less seasonal variation in light. Despite the age-related problems they are expecting, they have performed beyond all expectations; they were originally designed to operate for just 90 days when they landed on opposite sides of Mars two and a half years ago.

Spirit's right front wheel gave up the ghost back in March. The rover team decided  to park Spirit on a rocky slope called Low Ridge Haven for the winter. From this spot, Spirit has continued to examine the rocks and soil around it while measuring the atmosphere's temperature.

Opportunity, like some of us, is suffering from a a stiff shoulder joint - in this case, on its instrument deployment arm. The rover team is trying to avoid exacerbating the problem, using the arm as little as possible. Its anemic performance was a few weeks ago, however, when the wind blew the dust off of its solar panels, allowing them to absorb more solar energy.

Over the past weekend, Opportunity examined a 30-metre-wide crater named Beagle, and is now on its way to an area where the wind has deposited sand and dust in rippled structures. The presence of sand clods indicate the possibility of small amounts of water, according to rover team member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Arvidson hopes the site will reveal something of the area's history geologic history over the past four billion years, when several small lakes apparently dried up. He'd like to know how acidic the water was farther back in time on the Red Planet. "That really tells you about habitability," he says. "Most astrobiologists think that life is easier to get started in more neutral conditions." Earlier geologic data indicates that Martian water was very acidic.

In the meantime, click on the picture below to get a better look at a recent image of the Martian surface.