Let's talk about slime molds. Specifically, Physarum polycephalum, which despite being a big gooey bag of nuclei and protoplasm, may be intelligent - sort of.

On this week's Observation Deck, I'm contemplating the car-free metropolises of the future.

This week we take a look at how Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi films have changed over the years.

I'm thinking about what could happen if we tear up some of those ribbons of roads and start over again. We might end up with better cities.

Considering some of the tsuris characters in science fiction go through, it's no wonder they drink. But what, exactly, are they drinking?

The cars: They will drive themselves. That's pretty much a given at this point, thanks to artificial intelligence research at Stanford and elsewhere. And they'll talk to each other, too — the processes that let our cars go fast and get to where we tell them won't be centralized. There won't be a control tower. Software will sort it out among itself.

This week on the Observation Deck, I'm thinking about the different flavors of books, sending information across time, and the way to judge a book without a cover.

We inscribe words on our cities -- street signs, neon, billboards and sometimes poetry and knowledge about the city itself.

You already know that the second movie in a big action trilogy is usually the best one. But I think I might have figured out why that's the case (no spoilers; watch the video above to get my theory).

In this edition of Observation Deck, I'm pitching an approach that combines all that data with geolocation technologies and maps. What would that look like?