For those who like their 21st century technology wrapped up in 19th century packaging, meet Japan’s Take G wooden robots. In sizes ranging from a few inches to two feet tall, toy lovers of all ages will be thrilled. (no info on pricing or availability)
Take-G

The "planet’s largest robot competition" is about to get underway in San Francisco and the last robot still in operating condition wins.

"The combat robots keep getting better each year," said RoboGames founder David Calkins.
"We’ve got teams flying in from around the US and Canada, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Netherlands, Australia, and even Iran just to compete in the robot combat.

Over 800 robots from 30 countries will be competing in 61 various RoboGames events, the most notable of which include combat, fire-fighting, android acrobatics, android kung-fu, and iron-man exoskeleton weight lifting.

There are 83 categories, 18 of them devoted to walking "android" robots designed in human forms. US robots will defend the "android soccer" gold medal won last year.

"Football is very big this year," Calkins said. "And there are lots of humanoids."

physorg

Remember hearing that Mars has (or had) oceans of methane or water on its surface? Well, that story just popped up again and this time with some harder evidence to support it. I suppose that if this new evidence supports it enough we should send an army of robots to find out for us! Hooray Robots!

 "Taylor Perron of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues think that massive wobbles in the planet’s rotation may explain the mystery of Martian sea.

"Working with a mathematical model of Mars, the team found that volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts could have caused the planet’s poles to shift in the past, a phenomenon called true polar wander. A side effect of this would have been large-scale deformation in the crust, accounting for the strangely varying coastline heights.

If correct, the team’s findings make it likely that a body of water once covered one-third of the Martian surface – about the size of the Pacific Ocean – near the equator, then later migrated into the northern hemisphere as the poles shifted. "We’ve turned what has been a monkey wrench for us into a piece of evidence that supports the idea there were oceans on Mars," says Perron.

The final piece of the puzzle, he adds, will be finding how enough water to fill the basin is now buried in the crust. The basin has been dry for at least the past 2 billion years."

Journal reference: Nature (vol 447, p 840)

The X-Finger: these steel-and-plastic prosthetic fingers earned inventor Dan Didrick second place in a national invention contest sponsored by the History Channel and the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation.

Despite no medical background, Didrick has come up with a novel non-robotic prosthetic device to replace a missing finger. What makes this different is that the finger can curl like the biological ones we were born with.

"I’m proud of what I’ve done," says Didrick. "I can only hope what I’ve made can also help change as many lives."

Since he does not have the resources to produce his device in any great numbers, he has currently outsourced production to a California company, which can make about 100 fingers every 45 days.

To fulfill the demand for the X-Finger, Didrick says he needs at least $11 million. That would provide for 25 engineers and computer designers and would boost production for a three-year span.

Continuing the robot news this week, Japan’s latest creation, called Kansei, is capable of 36 facial expressions triggered by word associations from a self-updating online database of 500,000 keywords. That means it will react with appropriate expression to certain words with its 19 movable parts within a silicon face mask.

If someone asked me (though no one has), it’s just too weird.

Earlier in the week, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency, unveiled CB2, child-sized robot, which moves as a toddler would – a human toddler, that is.

It can turn over and be helped to its — um, feet, has 51 compressed air-powered actuators, and has 200 tactile sensors in its "skin." Check it out.

"What we are trying to do here is to create a flow of consciousness in robots so that they can make the relevant facial expressions," said project leader Junichi Takeno, a professor at Meiji University’s School of Science and Technology.

This whole thing is creeping me out.