Is this the future in personal assistants? "The remarkable thing is that not only did the Anybot make it all the way to the coffee shop on its own [sic] but the Anybot was actually given service!" Could further development, crossed with visual interfaces such as Kinect lead us to the Bruce Willis' Surrogates and isolate us or is it the beginning of the uprising?
posted by deemer on Feb 13, 2011 - 57 comments

A robotic teacher, Ms. Saya, conducts her first class at an elementry school in Tokyo. [more inside]
posted by lauratheexplorer on Oct 7, 2010 - 28 comments

How to Train Your Robot (to Lie). "A military base has just fallen to enemy fighters. A robot containing top-secret information has to escape detection by the invading army. The robot is facing three corridors: right, center, and left. It could randomly pick a corridor and hope the enemy soldiers pick a different one. Or it could leave a false trail—assuming robots can be trained to lie. A new study using this scenario suggests that they can be. 'Those lying toasters.' click for picture (Georgia Tech's Decepticon) knows how to mislead pursuers to shake them off." Also, worth checking out is a video that can be viewed from the main link which demonstrates the robots in a game of hide-and-seek.
posted by Fizz on Sep 13, 2010 - 23 comments

Rise of the rat-brained robots. [Via]
posted by homunculus on Aug 15, 2008 - 39 comments

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."
posted by finite on Aug 1, 2008 - 52 comments

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey on Oct 5, 2006 - 54 comments

On the Chilean island of Robinson Crusoe, a small GPR-enabled robot named Arturito (google translated page) has apparently just found "The biggest treasure in history..." (estimated at $10 Billion).
posted by numlok on Sep 26, 2005 - 25 comments

The History of Robots in the Victorian Era
posted by anastasiav on Nov 5, 2003 - 2 comments

Robot Rats!
Excellent, now i can take over the WORLD!!
Please add, Predator like optics and Universal Soilder healing abilities - I expect to see them on thinkGeek by the end of the month, thank you.
Although a little cruel, scientist have managed to put implants in rats brains, effectivley given them god like controls of the little vermin.
posted by monkeyJuice on May 2, 2002 - 16 comments

Introducing ... Ratbot! Leave it to the good folks at SUNY to come up with a remote-controlled rat. Best of all: "If the rat correctly followed the cue and turned left, its reward-centre was stimulated, filling the rat with a feeling of well-being."
posted by risenc on May 1, 2002 - 8 comments

Teeny tiny robots - Neato!
posted by plinth on Feb 24, 2001 - 6 comments

More than meets the eye. Next stop, Cybertron!
posted by jjg on Jan 19, 2001 - 6 comments

Love, robots and ghosts are each the topic of fascinating snippets at newscientist.com.
posted by grumblebee on Jul 18, 2000 - 2 comments

Boba Fett hired by NASA.
posted by Nyarlathotep on Jun 14, 2000 - 4 comments

Rat-mind-control-robot. Where'd these rat's sign up? I want my cyborgian arm!
posted by shmuel on May 2, 2000 - 3 comments