I'm just an undergrad, so I can't claim any expertise is career options, but I as a cognitive science major, I am doing research in designing neural networks that mimic human learning (both at the behavioral and neuronal level). Not only is it contributing to that field, but my professor plans to use this research to better model autism and develop better ways to diagnose it early and to treat it after it's identified. I find it very rewarding to be a part of such an endeavor. As for the programming side of things, we primarily use MATLAB since the code we are building off of was written in that and it makes working with lots of very large matrices easy, however there has been talk of switching to Python due to the proprietary nature of MATLAB. I have heard from many people (professors and students) that computational cognitive neuroscience (which encompasses everything from learning algorithms to brain controlled prosthetics) is going to become a hot field of research (think lots of funding) in the coming years. Keep in mind this is just hearsay though, and can't truly speak to the veracity of such claims... Perhaps other slashdotters will know more about the field... I just know I feel the same way about spending my working hours doing something to make the world a better place :-)

Funny this article came up. The University of Illinois is doing something similar with pig manure... Check it out at http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/news/stories/news3557.htm l The article isn't very detailed, but it is interesting.