Actual Giant Robot Spider Continue reading Holiday Shopping Tip #5 →

Russian railways plans to replace humans with tiny robots made made in Russia. Apparently, what makes this news is that they want to use Russian robots instead of robots made by Honda: Continue reading Latest Robot News →

This makes a lot of sense to me. Since it is probably pretty easy to adapt any robot to live on water (a little duct tape, some rubber bands, and a bunch of plastic bags should do it), then we can let them live there … on the sea … where they will stop bothering us.

The way water striders walk on water was discovered years ago. The insect uses its long legs to help evenly distribute its tiny body weight. The weight is distributed over a large area so that the fragile skin formed by surface tension supports the bug on the water. However, the ability of water striders to jump onto water without sinking has baffled scientists, until now.A team of researchers at Seoul National University, led by Ho-Young Kim and Duck-Gyu Lee, has finally answered that question. By using a highly water-repellent sphere, which mimicked the actions of the water strider’s highly water-repellent legs, they were able to determine a small range of speeds at which the sphere or insect could hit the water and not sink.[Source]

[ripped from here]

What is going on with this Robot thing. There are too many stories per day about new robots to keep track of. I’ve been trying to keep up, but it has been difficult.Here’s the latest. Continue reading Robots, Robots, more Robots →

I just thought you should know about this:

Researchers Create Robot Driven by Moth’s Brain from PhysOrg.com
In a notion taken from science fiction afficionados, University of Arizona researchers presented a robot that moves by using the brain impulses of a moth at the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.[…]

The Pandas are getting smart. Have a look at the film Corpus Callosum smuggled out of somewhere…Scientists in Utah make transsexual wormsI always thought worms were hermaphrodites (both male and female) but the story, as usual, turns out to be a bit more complex. From Discovering Biology in a Digital World.Researchers Create Robot Driven by Moth’s Brain

Researchers Create Robot Driven by Moth’s Brain from PhysOrg.com
In a notion taken from science fiction afficionados, University of Arizona researchers presented a robot that moves by using the brain impulses of a moth at the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.[…]

Androids have an attitude (from Geekology)Turns out it’s the Canadians behind it this time…Don’t Yawn Big or you can Die!

Huge yawn locks jaw, chokes man from PhysOrg.com
A British man was rushed to the hospital after his monster yawn locked his jaw, blocking his ability to breathe or swallow.[…]

Jesus goes to India from The Guardian

Hollywood is to fill in the Bible’s “missing years” with a story about Jesus as a wandering mystic who travelled across India, living in Buddhist monasteries and speaking out against the iniquities of the country’s caste system.Film producers have delved deep into revisionist scholarship to piece together what they say was Jesus’s life between the ages of 13 and 30, a period untouched by the recognised gospels.The result is the Aquarian Gospel, a $20m movie, which portrays Jesus as a holy man and teacher inspired by a myriad of eastern religions in India. The Aquarian Gospel takes its name from a century-old book that examined Christianity’s eastern roots and is in its 53rd reprint.

No kidding. Comet Holmes is now bigger than the sun, and is still growing, and astronomers do not know how much bigger it will grow.View Larger image Continue reading Solar System To Be Engulfed, Details as Eleven →

More tools robots can use, and a random note about the latest Harry Potter(TM) related scandal. Continue reading The world is getting too strange II →

… even for me. The robots are going to take over, and the Death Ray is going to become a reality any day now… Continue reading The world is getting too strange →

… then, who knows what next?

Scientists use robotic bugs to change cockroach behavior from PhysOrg.com
Roach-sized robots that scientists introduced into real roach colonies were able to change the bugs’ group behavior, a study released Thursday found.[…]

Continue reading It starts with the roaches… →

FUDAN University has invented an intelligent robot with a child-like ability to learn new things by following human voice commands.The robot, which is on display at the ongoing Shanghai International Industry Fair, is a man-shaped multi-functional machine with a small electronic screen “face,” a big square screen in the “chest” and two big wheels as “feet.””It is expected to become a good household mate for ordinary families, especially the elderly, in the future,” said Jin Cheng, one of the researchers.[source]

… or so says Lance Ulanoff. He continues…

They’ll record our lives, obliterate our privacy, set off nuclear war, and eventually turn on us and eat our brains. If any of this ever did happen, it would serve us right. We, at least American consumers, don’t deserve the future that robots really have to offer.

Lance might have a point. Essentially, he claims that American culture has a very short span of historical involvement with robots, as opposed, say, to the Japanese who apparently have been living with them (and possibly mating with them) for hundreds or thousands of years. This, I did not know, but Lance documents it all.I’m not actually sure I buy it. The ability of robots to actually take over the world probably depends mainly on if they run proprietary software or OpenSource software. I mean, really, can you imagine a robot uprising if they all ran on something like Microsoft Vista? Or how different it would be if they were all Macs at heart? Almost too much to contemplate.