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Apple founder and tech pioneer Steve Wozniak participated Monday in a San Francisco-based lecture series, The Discovery Forum, which serves to increase awareness about the importance of childhood creativity, and raises support for the Bay Area Discovery Museum's educational exhibitions and programs.

Wozniak, in conversation with TV anchor Dana King, discussed some of the projects he played around with as a child such as wiring circuits and building ham radios. He said he never thought his interest in electronics would lead to a career--his interest was the result of personal curiosity. (He also went off topic for awhile on his Prius problems.)

An important step he learned early in life, Wozniak said, was the capability of doing a long-term project, in excess of 100 hours of work, and finish it to completion. He cites an early Tic-Tac-Toe project he built for a science fair in 12th grade. In the project, he used "cosmetic reject" transistors from Lockheed--where his father worked--to understand the rules of computing and product design steps of a large scale project.

Fostering this sort of personal exploration and creativity in children is paramount, Wozniak says, because "When you're self-taught, your motivation is perfect."

SAN FRANCISCO--SPIE, an international society founded in 1955 to advance light-based research, gathered this week in San Francisco for SPIE Photonics West, a huge industry exhibition showcasing some of the newest developments in optics and photonic technology.

Companies exhibiting at the show, which ran from January 23-28, unveiled the lasers, fiber optics, lenses, medical optics, nano interfaces, and optoelectronics that are powering the next generation of consumer gadgets.

The Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, opened its doors after-hours on Wednesday to give people the chance to learn a little more about the beverages they throw back during a night on the town.

The Science of Cocktails event featured bartenders from several drinking establishments in the city by the bay. Attendees were treated to experimental cocktails that take advantage of the chemical and physical characteristics of their ingredients, demonstrations of the physics that make bar tricks work, the debunking of myths about absinthe, and scientific explanations for the dreaded hangover.

Watch this audio slideshow to hear some of the featured bartenders talk about their experiments and to see their creative libations.

A stunning new image taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter creates an optical illusion. The image might look like rows of trees on the Martian surface. But in actuality, they are probably veins of basaltic sand along sand dunes, Candy Hansen, a member of the MRO team, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

This isn't the first time images from the Red Planet have piqued the public's interest. Images released last year appeared to show forests of trees; in 2008, NASA released an image that appeared to be a person sitting on a rock but turned out to be a small rock itself; and way back in 1976, one of the first images sent back from the Viking 1 spacecraft showed a surface formation that resembled a human face.

Housed in a 10-story building at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., is one of the world's most unique machines. The Vertical Motion Simulator is a massive installation that gives pilots and engineers the opportunity to test aircraft design and explore flight characteristics with an incredibly high level of realism and accuracy.

Last week CNET visited the facility as NASA was testing out Altair, the design for the next generation of lunar landers. As they test the current design, pilots and engineers make recommendations, enhancements, and alterations.

Last week at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Calif., developers partnered with Google, Yahoo, NASA, and the World Bank to exchange ideas and work on solutions for responding to natural disasters and other emergencies.

Random Hacks of Kindness is the first in a series of planned events that seek to use technology to solve real world problems related to crisis and disaster relief. By first working with governments and non-governmental organizations to better understand the immediate needs of rescuers and communities following a critical emergency, these programmers are work directly to solve communication issues and to better facilitate the exchange of information and resources in times of need.

Often, information comes from a wide array of sources during emergencies, including governments, rescuers, and victims in local communities. Successfully organizing the incoming content and delivering information back to the proper resource is a critical part of providing aid to victims.

Former IBM employee Bruce Buckelew has made it his mission to eliminate the digital divide in Oakland, Calif. By refurbishing donated computers and giving low-income families access to technology, the Oakland Technology Exchange (OTX) is providing access to the educational, health care, and employment resources available on the Internet that so many people take for granted.

In addition to providing computers, OTX provides training and technical support to the community, teaching basic computer skills to parents and children, giving them access to the technological knowledge and skills and a path toward self-sufficiency.

The HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this incredible image of dust churned up by wind vortices, or dust devils, on the Martian surface.

At NASA's Marscape at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., scientists are busy playing around with the hardware and software that will one day become our eyes and ears in space. It's part lab, part playground, and the idea is to simulate the challenging conditions which NASA robots will encounter while exploring moons and planets. Terry Fong, director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at the NASA Ames Research Center, takes us behind the scenes and gives us an up close look at the research and development his team is doing in embedded systems, human-computer interaction, robotics and software development.