This little sucker weights 60-milligrams, has a 3cm wingspan, and flies (no pun intended) just like a real fly. Developed at Harvard on a DARPA contract, I’m sure this is just the first of many such surveillance units that will be used to ensure that we’re not out to overthrow the central AI.

Not much to say about this, really. This man lost his legs to an accident, and now he’s walking again–albeit with the assistance of some bionic legs and a walker. Technology can be truly amazing stuff.

It may come as a surprise, or it might not, but the military has been steadily making use of robotic figures for especially dangerous missions. Some are operated by remote control and some directed by an appropriate operator, but all are quite capable of investigating potential ambush scenarios or removing explosive devices. And as the robots have no sense of fear, they would make for an excellent alternative to real soldiers when a situation is deemed too severe for an average human.

While the use of robotics might be too expensive, anything that will lessen the number of human casualties in the military seems like a good idea.

*Picture courtesy of Reuters.com*

Vision Robotics’ future fleet of agricultural robots is another step closer to reality with a prototype in the works for next year.

These robotic devices would glide through orchards picking the fruit.

Previous mechanical harvesters were too inefficient because it looked for one piece of fruit at a time. Then engineers actually went into the orchards and had an idea.

"Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.

A working model might have been in the fields right now, Cesar Chavez, the leader of the United Farm Workers, began a campaign against mechanization back in 1978. He wanted federal funding for displaced farm workers.

I hope we are smart enough to realize that this kind of thinking would have kept us in stone-age caves.

Today I was going to write a nice article on the Wii or maybe Apple’s new operating system and it’s pros and cons. Then I got creative and thought…mmm, how about writing about robotics or even the progress of Holograms? Yet, none of this really interests me today. Call it being uninspired, but this stuff is BORING! Most of the time tech and science are really exciting (see yesterdays article on Tesla).

So, I thought back and remembered what I used to do early in the mornings, then it hit me. CARTOONS!!! So, instead of writing a long, boring article about what everyone is writing about, I’ll leave you with  one of the greatest science cartoons ever created. For those of you who actually care, it’s from the man himself: Walt Disney. Just click on the link below because for some reason this blog manager won’t let me embed it directly onto this page. Go figure.

Life on mars Video courtesy of You Tube.

May the Force be with you.