Northwestern University robotics engineer Malcolm McIver was a consultant on the upcoming movie Tron, and worked with writers on Battlestar Galactica as well as Caprica to make the cylons plausible - if not possible (yet). He tells Script Ph.D.:

One of the themes of my research is understanding the ways in which intelligence is not just all about what's above your shoulders. Nervous systems evolved with the bodies they control-the interaction is extremely sophisticated, and stubbornly resists our attempts to understand it through basic science research or emulation in robotics . . . One of the things we've learned about the cleverness that resides outside the cranium is that things like the spinal cord are incredibly sophisticated "brains" operating sometimes without much input from upstairs. Through some old experiments that are better not gone into, scientists showed that animals can walk with little brain beyond the parts that regulate circulation and breathing and their spinal cord. This is because the spinal cord can do most of what we need for basic locomotion without any input. The point is that control of the body is distributed-it doesn't just live in the brain. The lesson hasn't been lost on robotics folks; for example, Rodney Brooks popularized an approach called "subsumption architecture" based on this idea. So – back to Caprica: For episode 2, "Rebirth," the show needed some explanation for why the metacognitive processor was only working in one robot. The real reason, as we know, is that only one had Zoe in it; but the roboticists were being pressed by Daniel Graystone as to why it wasn't working in others. The idea that I gave them, which they used, was that it was because this particular metacognitive processor had distributed its control to peripheral subunits. Because of this, it had become tied to one particular robot. It's an idea straight out of contemporary neuroscience and efforts to emulate this in robotics.

So maybe not every detail of Caprica is scientifically accurate, but it's interesting to know how much thought went into creating Zoe's cylon.

There's a lot more interesting stuff in this interview, via Script Ph.D.

Slime molds fascinate biologists because they're essentially swarms of single-celled creatures that can coalesce to act as one larger organism. Your basic slime mold is a one-celled unit, not very different from an amoeba. However, when activated by a chemical signal, the individual cells can come together to form a supercell—a largish, sometimes meters-long mass that creeps across the ground in search of nutrients. In their multicellular states, slime molds can look like mushrooms, puddles, and any number of other things. When mobile, they've been observed to move at more than a millimeter per second—not bad for a team of cells just looking to satisfy their hunger.

But slime molds aren't just interesting for the "wandering slicks of goop" factor; they have much to teach us, too. In January, we discovered that slime molds are at least as good at urban planning as the civil engineers who designed Tokyo's subways. Here are some more surprising things we've learned from slime molds in recent years.

They reflect systems the world over. Whatever the laws that let masses of slime-mold cells respond as one to changes in their environment, Ted Cox believes they apply to cells in countless other places, including our bodies. "It's a unifying theory of excitable systems," Cox, a biologist at Princeton, told Wired recently. Slime molds linked in a supercell can communicate with each other in the same way that our brain cells collude to release neurotransmitters, in the same way that nutrient levels are regulated in the womb, in the same way that communicable diseases jump from person to person. If we figure out the exact mechanisms by which slime molds talk to each other, it could explain vast amounts about life at the higher levels.

They can control robots. In 2006, a team at the University of Southampton grew a slime mold on top of a circuit in the shape of a six-pointed star. The circuit was then mapped to a small six-legged robot that sat a few feet away. Once that was done, the movements of the slime mold were echoed in the movements of the robot. Slime molds avoid light if they can, so when the slime mold was exposed to light and tried to move away, the robot scrambled around, mimicking the slime mold's attempt to find a comfortable dark space.

They have brains, sort of. In 2008, scientists at Hokkaido University had slime mold cells crawl across a petri dish. For ten minutes at the top of every hour, the scientists generated cold, dry conditions in the lab, causing the slime cells to slow down until the dish had warmed up again. After three hours of this, the researchers stopped changing the lab temperature, but the slime molds continued to slow down on their own, right on schedule, in anticipation of the cold. The scientists then kept conditions stable for a few hours, and the slime molds eventually adjusted, maintaining a steady pace. But when the researchers dropped the temperature again, the slime molds remembered and resumed the ten-minutes-every-hour pattern. The report concluded that the slime molds were demonstrating "a primitive version of brain function"—impressive for organisms without a brain.

They can't be stopped. A 2007 gardening column at the Chicago Tribune notes that "there is no way to prevent slime molds; the spores are all over the place, just waiting for the right conditions to become active." Pattern-learning, robot-controlling mobile slime units that can form at a moment's notice? We don't know about you, but this is the best news we've heard all day.

Pictured: the charmingly named Dog Vomit Slime Mold. Photo by Franco Folini, used under Creative Commons license.

"I…hate hurting things…and breaking things…I wish we could all get along…If I can avoid a battle…I think that's best…"
— To-Ru Zekuu and Yuna Takanagi, Shiki Tsukai

"I'm not going to let anyone be killed!"
— Chika Shiomi, Canon

Postapocalyptic science fiction generally falls into one of two camps: (1) idealistic stories which celebrate the importance of maintaining morality and humanity under terrible circumstances (as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and (2) pragmatic stories which delight in pointing out the idiocy of idealists and revealing the awful things we must do to stay alive (as in much of the fiction of John Christopher, J.G. Ballard, David Gerrold). The same divisions can be found in genre manga, from manga which celebrate sentimentality and human compassion to manga which present the readers, and characters, with terrible moral choices.

These grim-and-gritty seinen (adult) manga have roughly the same relation to normal shonen (boys') manga as revisionist superhero comics, such as Watchmen, do to normal superhero comics.

Watchmen, like most of the famous comics of the '80s and '90s, is not an adult work in an adult medium; it's an adult work consciously grounded in a "children's" medium, and using the conventions of a "children's" genre, the superhero genre. Superhero comics originated out of crime comics, and most superheroes are still crimefighters, whether on a local or cosmic level. The parallel with American foreign policy is clear-as America is "the world's policeman," so some of the most famous superhero comics deal with the idea of the responsibility and morality of having absolute power, from Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme (1985-1986) to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1986-1987) to Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's The Authority (1999). The heroes/antiheroes of Watchmen and similar, less self-examining comics fight for lofty ideals, and sometimes hard-headed political concerns, with little concern for the collateral damage. They may get doubts and get angsty about all that responsibility, but well, "heavy is the head that wears the crown" and all that.

Children's manga, like superhero comics, has its own genre expectations and conventions of morality. To quote Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki, who always speaks frankly (and approvingly) about censorship in his work, "The basics of a shonen manga are smiles and a happy ending." But compared to superhero comics, manga heroes are usually motivated by more personal concerns, by protecting their family, friends and loved ones. One of the most commonly repeated words in shonen manga, right behind yûjô ("friendship"), is mamoru ("protect" or "defend").

"We're not fighting…we're protecting!" a hero says in One Piece. Phrases like "I'm fighting because I have something I need to protect!" show up over and over in countless manga. For every boys' manga like the '80s hit Fist of the North Star in which defeated enemies have their brains splattered, there are five manga like Dragon Ball Z, in which defeated enemies are befriended, neutralized and converted to the heroes' worldview. Thus, the circle of the protagonists' friends grows and grows. Only in this way, through taking everyone into the protected circle, does the hero get the hubris to want to "save the world" — usually expressed as "I want to protect everyone!" , an almost Buddhist feeling of compassion for all things, except perhaps for some final enemy who is just too ugly to be redeemed.

The preference for defensive to aggressive violence in Japanese comics is easily tied back to Japan's postwar political climate. Having experienced the horrors of nuclear bombs and military defeat firsthand, the Japanese public has a strong pacifistic streak, and Article 9 of Japan's 1947 constitution — which forbids Japan from waging offensive war or maintaining a standing army-still has majority support. In addition to the occasional portrayals of swaggering, arrogant Americans (http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/3116), defeat may have instilled a distrust of ideologues of all kinds. Typically, it's the coldhearted rival or villain characters who speak of abstracts like "the world" or "justice," while the warmhearted heroes care about immediate concerns like their friends. In the climactic scene of Hitoshi Iwaaki's seinen manga Parasyte (1990), in which a hero fuses his body with an alien to protect the earth from alien predators, the hero contemplates letting one of the predators go because it, like him, is just another living being; but then he decides that he has to kill it to protect his friends and other humans like himself. "Forgive me," he says as he delivers the final blow.

But regardless of political sentiment, Japanese readers, like people everywhere, are still fascinated with images of power and destruction, and the archetypal form of this power is not a colorful caped hero (or even a colorful gi-wearing martial artist, Dragon Ball Z excepted) but a colorful robot. Like superheroes in the U.S., giant robots are a children's genre that attracts pretty good talent because it pays pretty good money, and is often used by creators to deliver adult messages. Go Nagai's Mazinger Z (1972) and Getter Robo (1974), although strictly kid's shows, upped the level of collateral damage and destruction in the genre, with both heroes and villains smashing cities to pieces, intentionally or accidentally. Yoshiyuki Tomino's famous anime Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) gave the toy-selling formula a backbone of hard sci-fi and military drama, with serious characters making serious choices and sometimes dying.

Through Gundam, the giant robot show gained a certain dignity, pleasing both robot fans and military otaku; perhaps science fiction wars on a distant planet were more socially acceptable than imagining wars on this Earth. Then came Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). Working within the robot genre, Anno broke its rules in two ways: (1) the show was aggressively personal, with Anno openly admitting that the main character's antisocial tendencies and depression were based on his own issues; and (2) the show ripped away all the "romance of the battlefield" veneer of Gundam and its ilk, forcing the main character to commit atrocities in order to save the earth, then in the end, making those sacrifices meaningless.

Although Evangelion was very internal and free of political content, in interviews Anno expressed the belief, shared by many Japanese pundits, that Japan's postwar generations had been spoiled and emasculated. A similar message was expressed much more directly, without Evangelion's neuroses and self-doubt, in Kenichi Sonoda's Cannon God Exaxxion (1998). In this seinen manga update of Mazinger Z, the main character is a manga hero in the old-school sense, fiery and tough, but even he is shocked by the acts he has to commit in order to save the world. The message, expressed with Machiavellian glee by his mad scientist grandfather is that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, i.e.you can't save earth from alien invaders in a giant robot without causing tons of collateral damage and smushing tons of innocent people.

In Evangelion and Exaxxion, to "protect everyone" is just wishful thinking. Emotion, the warm human feeling valued in shonen manga , has to be thrown out the window when the chips are down. Or to put it another way, in tough times you can't afford to save everyone; you have to protect your own. The message is delivered even more brutally in Mohiro Kitoh's seinen manga Bokurano ("Ours") (2003).

In Kitoh's manga , a mysterious otherworldly visitor chooses 12 children to be the pilots of a giant robot and defend the earth against other robots which appear to be piloted by alien invaders. At first, it seems like fun giant robot escapism, but eventually, they find out the truth; the "invaders" are merely people like them, only from a parallel world. The "giant robot battle" is a sort of mechanism of the universe, by which representatives of each world are pitted in battle, and the losing world is wiped out of existence. In a typical manga, the heroes might take a moral stand and figure out some deus ex machina way of making everyone survive, but in Bokurano there is no way out. With its extreme, amoral "kill or be killed" situation, Bokurano is sort of a cosmic version of the novel/film Battle Royale, where teenagers are put on an isolated island and forced to kill each other off until only one survives. The weapon may be giant robots, but the law of the universe is tooth and claw.

Bokurano is unrelenting, but it deals with sci-fi moral abstracts; manga with real-world political parallels are rarer. Shonen manga with political sentiments used to be much more common than they are now, one classic being Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen (1973), a realistic antiwar story about the Hiroshima bombing that is notable for having no real "bad guy." Pluto (2003), Naoki Urasawa's science fiction manga of morally conflicted combat robots openly based on a 1960s Astro Boy storyline, is full of references to the Iraq War (in the guise of the "39th Middle East War"); as a literal 'adult retelling' of a classic children's manga, it's perhaps more often compared to Watchmen than any other manga.

But even in shonen manga, some artists try to mix shonen manga's sunny idealism with realpolitik subject matter. One such manga is Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist (2001), an action-adventure story set in a vaguely steampunk world. The heroes begin the series working as State Alchemists for their vaguely Germanic homeland of Amestris, a country embroiled in various wars, but as the series progresses it becomes clear that Amestris is a ruthless military dictatorship and their fanatical "enemies," the clearly Middle-Eastern-styledIshbalans, are the victims of a genocide campaign orchestrated by the Amestris government.

Although the teenage heroes, Edward and Alphonse, are unaware of the genocide when the series begins and rebel against their masters once they learn the truth, the twentysomething secondary characters, Armstrong and Mustang and Hawkeye, all took place in the massacre and have joined in the subsequent coverup. But they aren't bad guys deep down-having "obeyed orders" and committed atrocities in his youth, Colonel Mustang resolves to work within the system, climb in rank and gain power, so that one day he can control the nation and prevent such things from ever happening again. "I will protect your lives," Mustang tells his trusted subordinates. "And you will protect only whom you can…even if it's only a few, protect those below you. And those below you would also protect those below them. No matter what happens, live, continue to survive greedily. Live, and let's change this country together."

In other words, Mustang's first duty is to protect his friends and the people he knows, and from there, maybe someday, he can eventually "protect the whole world." It's even suggested that, in this world he creates, Mustang himself might be tried for war crimes. It's nice wishful thinking, and Fullmetal Alchemist deserves praise for being an ambitious manga, but it's a little disturbing to see a participant in genocide depicted as a tormented, self-sacrificing hero. (A friend suggested that Fullmetal Alchemist might be a veiled attempt to deal with Japanese WW2 war crimes in Asia, in addition to the obvious modern political parallels.)

Is the absolute coldness of manga like Bokurano more honest, or is Fullmetal Alchemist the more daring manga for taking on such loaded subject matter? Japanese comics are more likely to cast their conflicts in immediate emotional terms rather than grand ideals, but ultimately, the division between children's and adult manga is not so different than the division between children's and adult's comics in America — one assumes that the world can be divided into heroes and villains, and the other, to varying degrees, shatters those assumptions and looks unpleasant realities in the face.

Jason Thompson is the author of the graphic novel King of RPGs and Manga: The Complete Guide. He also draws his own comics.

Artist Frankell Baramdyka posted two giant collections of Transformers concept art on his blog recently. And other sites mention that Barmadyka is working on the Transformers 3 tie-in game, and that he created this art for the game. (I can't find any such claim on Baramdyka's blog — he just identifies the art as "Transformers concept art." His LinkedIn profile does say he works for Activision, which is doing the Transformers 3 game though.)

In any case, with Transformers 3 scheduled to come out in the summer of 2011, it's not unreasonable to think the tie-in game would be well into the development process. The surprising thing about Baramdyka's art is that it doesn't depict an Earthbound storyline at all — instead, it takes place on a jungle planet and someplace called Lithos, which is apparently a city on Cybertron. There are ruins on the jungle planet where the Autobots seem to discover something, and there's also a temple on the "Mechanical Planet" (which I'm guessing is also Cybertron.)

We've had some hints lately that Transformers 3 would delve a bit more into the backstory of the Autobots and the Decepticons, possibly including some sequences on Cybertron. If this artwork does actually reflect what's in the game, and if that's closely tied in to the movie's storyline — two big ifs — then this could be our first hint as to how much time Michael Bay's third transforming robot epic will spend traveling through space.

Update: Some sites are identifying this art as coming from the War For Cybertron game instead, which would certainly make sense. Baramdyka hasn't identified it either way. In any case, seeing such cool vistas and alien worlds in the next Michael Bay movie is probably too much to hope for.

More art at the link. [Frankell Baramdyka via Shogun Gamer]

Peratech's signature product is a kind of sensitive metal-and-silicone material called quantum tunneling composite, or QTC. This technology lies at the intersection of "electronic" and "tactile": it responds to pressure, converting physical force into electric signal. It's already been used to create more sophisticated touchscreens, as well as an "off button" on electronic passports to stop them from broadcasting RFID tags all over the place.

Now, according to MIT's Technology Review blog, researchers at the university's Media Lab department hope to dress up their robots in QTC:

QTC robot skin could perhaps let a robot know precisely where it has been touched, and with how much pressure. It could also be helpful in designing machines that have better grasping capabilities, and for developing more natural ways for machines to interact with humans.

QTC is also pretty easily molded, and in the words of a Peratech press release, it can be "'draped' over an object much like a garment might." Thus, robots with skin—skin that knows how hard you're touching it, and where. There could be any number of exciting applications for this; it might actually herald a major step forward in the way we interact with machines. But it's hard not to worry that if the people behind Roxxxy the sex robot ever find about this stuff, the world will explode.

It all started when teknoarcanist asked:

So say you're in a futuristic setting. What are some PC terms that you, as a sentient machine, would prefer to be called? (eg. - android) Or would 'robot' about do it?

Not only was I glad he asked that question, as a future friend to liberated robots, but the discussion forum went into overdrive.

Here are some of their suggestions:

* As Bishop in Aliens puts it: 'Artificial Person'.

* AWESOME MECHANICAL MAN or AMM for short

* Biologically Challenged

* Synthetic? Not too derogatory and makes the difference between people and machines clear.

* If I was anything like I am right now, I'd be fine with being called a robot. I fucking hate PC language.

* Electromechanical Humanoid

* Hmm...'humanoid' might imply aspirations to humanity. A bit like referring to black people as 'non-whites'.

* I believe they would prefer to be called by their first name! For instance, Carl.

* I believe Red vs. Blue put it as "Mechanized American." So yeah that. Unless they're not American.

* Silica animus

* Autonomous Non-Biological Person

* It depends, if I was made out of plastics I would like to be referred to as a Silican, a Silican American, a Silican Briton, etc. If my outer casing (assuming I have one) is made out of metal I'd be a Ferran if it was iron, Coppan if it was Copper etc.

And the list goes on and on. This thread is made of win.

Read the rest and contribute via Escapist Magazine

After several months of trials, South Korea will spend approximately $45 million to place robotic teaching assistants in 500 preschools by 2011 and 8,000 preschools and kindergartens by 2013. If this schoolbot program proves effective, the robots - which teach via voice-recognition and long-distance learning technology - could invade elementary schools as well.

To their credit, the young students don't seem particularly fazed by their bizarre robo-teachers. Korean news reports that pupils find the robots fun and easy, but videos only show students visibly frustrated by their teachers' voice-recognition software. Take a look at the second video of a youngster learning with a robot - notice that she becomes notably peeved by her instructor's distinct lack of nuance when it comes to interpreting English accents.

More information on our impending robotic overlords can be found at Plastic Pals at the following links.

The robot hand was just one of the innovations on display at the Ministry of Defence's Center for Defence Enterprise today in Oxford. Walker told the Guardian:

It could be attached to a robot and used in difficult, dirty and dangerous places where you don't want to go but have to. The idea is that you can operate the hand in shirtsleeves without having to wear heavy bomb disposal body armour.

Images by Ben Stanstall/AFP/Getty Images.

The exhibition I... You... We... Robot is subtitled "A Visual Homage To Our Inner Geek," and there's some truly inspirational mechanistic art there. Robot art, at its coolest, is about us humans, the broken-down machines who repeat the same tasks every day like clockwork, as well as our connection with the technology we depend on. The exhibition is up from Jan. 29 to Feb. 19 at Space 242 in Boston, and gallery hours are Friday evenings 6:30-8pm and Saturdays 11:30am-1pm. Here are some of our other favorite images from the exhibition. [via owsome]

Win-Bot
Robots Steal Our Jobs by King Space Laser
Giant Robot by Dan Moynihan
Visitors And Builders by Vanessa Ly
Robot 347 by Kim Kent
Sohil by Skunk

According to the site, The Union has:

The world's most cutting-edge technology in organ replacement. Artiforgs-short for artificial organs- were originally developed to extend the lives of soldiers wounded in combat. We've taken this once-exclusive military technology and made it accessible to the general public. Thanks to our team of skilled scientists and technicians, you too can extend and enhance you life by purchasing your very own artiforg.

Here's a sampling of the pricey goods.

But even more interesting than the products are the commercials that are screened on the organ home shopping network. There's a mattress salesman who is ready and willing to test out his goods: in bed, with you. And a deodorant ad that claims to hold up to even the most extreme torture scenarios.

Now we're even more interested in this new future — it seems like a better way to shop, honestly.

Check out all the extra details at the Union website.

Created by EFF staff designer Hugh D'Andrade, this design is also available as a poster. And if you're in San Francisco next Tuesday, Feb. 10, consider coming to the EFF anniversary bash at the awesome DNA Lounge. (It's a fundraiser, so you gotta pay $30 at the door - but it's for a damn good cause.) Charlie Jane and I will be there dancing with this robot.

You can get poster versions of this amazing art here.

via EFF (Thanks, Hugh!)

This image, along with the other great robot illustrations we have here, is by concept artist extraordinaire Greg Broadmore, who works at Weta Workshop designing armors, weapons, creatures, and environments. And creating bizarre graphic novels about a steampunk world of adventurers and hucksters. Of this first image, Broadmore writes in his blog:

The Robot, he fall.
What is the cause?
It is an enigmatic mystery dilemma that may pain you till your dying day...
Unless I just tell you it's obviously another robot throwing cars at him.
Pow!
Take that Retardmobot!

Ah the sadness of the ballad of the Retardmobot.

We've interviewed Broadmore and shown off his art here, and you can see even more of his art on his blog.

Today's eye candy brought to you via Concept Robots

This is a detail from the exosuit from District 9.
Is this robot drinking Yerba Mate?
More of the District 9 exosuit.


It's important for robots to stay in shape, and that's why they need to do curls like the rest of us to to keep those, um, robobiceps in working order.

A lot happened in this episode, so I'll fill you in quickly and then get to the important part: The cylon.

Life In Little Tauron
We got more background on the Adamas as we watched little Willie Adama hanging out with his gangster uncle Sam in "Little Tauron," which is partly controlled by the Tauron mafia, called the H'la'tha. Even when Sam gets a call from his boss and has to smash the window of a shop, it's somehow obvious that he's secretly a nice guy. Though his idea of being a good uncle is to teach Willie how to get out of being arrested. Meanwhile, Joseph Adama is becoming more anxious about the idea of his daughter's avatar being lost in virtual reality, and he keep trying to call Daniel Graystone - who isn't picking up the phone.

Clarice's "History"
We also learn that there's something seriously creepy happening with Lacy and Zoe's teacher Clarice, who secretly schemed with the monotheistic students and in the pilot expressed sympathy for Ben's deadly tactics. In Friday's episode, she invited Lacy for lunch with her family, which turns out to be a giant, friendly group marriage. Except for one of the husbands, a young hunky guy who seems like he's hitting on Lacy the whole time. We know something is up when Lacy leaves and Clarice's husbands and wife start bugging Clarice about her "history" - and then Clarice storms out and smokes a ton of drugs in a bar.

Amanda The Clueless
And Amanda, Zoe's realistically clueless mom, gets a shock when the police tell her that Zoe had a boyfriend she didn't know about. She learns more and more about Zoe's secret life, and unfortunately connects the dot right when she's at a giant public memorial for victims of the terrorist bombing. Amanda gets on stage in front of all the TV cameras and starts babbling about how she thinks Zoe might have been a terrorist. Of course the crowd practically kills her - she and Daniel have to race away in their fancy car before things get really ugly.

Cyborg Consciousness
So that's where we are with everybody except Zoe, who represents the most fascinating part of the episode. The virtual version of Zoe is now on a chip inside Graystone's prototype cylon soldier, and she's having major body issues. Throughout the episode I was impressed with the way the writers tackled Zoe's identity, which is after all that of a teenage girl trapped inside the body of a giant, ugly war machine. Her weird predicament allows for some deeply disturbing scenes, like the ones in the top clip, where people argue over her gender identity and her mother stares right into her face and calls her a "monster." Not only is this a persuasive depiction of what it might be like to wake up as a cyborg, but it is also (oddly) not unlike what many teenage girls feel anyway - awkward, disconnected from their bodies, and constantly judged by peers and parents.

But the best scene with Zoe in her new body is this one, where she finally sees Lacy again. She's been relocated to her father's lab, where Daniel is trying to figure out why this particular cylon is the only one that seems to work. She's secretly called Lacy by mobile phone so that she can see her friend again at last. And one of her first questions for Lacy underscores the way Zoe's problems are both world-changing (she's the first AI) and utterly mundane (she has body image issues). Gesturing at her armored body, she asks, "Do I look male to you?"

I am completely in love with this portrait of a young cylon, plagued by gender issues and body dysmorphia, and facing an uncertain future that involves her family fortune (her father's company is depending on the success of the cylons to survive financially), her planet's politico-religious system, and the fact that she is completely unique. There is also that weird, clumsy moment where Lacy suggests that Zoe is "a trinity," which came off as incredibly glib and wrong. I wish the writers wouldn't try to shoehorn so many direct references to Christianity into this show - it's just too pat, too easy.

And yet that hug between Zoe and Lacy, where we switch perspective between Zoe's image of herself and the crude soldier bot that Lacy sees, is simply incredible. It seems to sum up both the horror and the hope embedded in their situation.

A few issues remain unresolved. I'm still not sure why Zoe is hiding her identity from everyone except Lacy. Obviously she can't trust Daniel, since the last time she did that he downloaded her onto that crappy chip that Joseph stole. And her mother is somebody she never trusted. But why not tell her other friends in the monotheistic group Soldiers of the One? Why not contact that "other family" on Geminon that she mentioned a few times? Obviously this is something we'll learn more about in future episodes, along with the backstory on shady teacher Clarice.

I'm also excited to see more of the Tauron immigrant culture, though I still feel like the show hasn't drawn a very convincing connection between the Adamas and the Graystones. Maybe that issue will be resolved too.

Regardless, I'm completely riveted by Zoe's story. I think she may be one of the most interesting robots I've ever seen represented on television or in film.

These amazing skyscapes and robots are the work of Canadian concept artist Robert Kim, whose fluid lines and bulging bots are a nice mashup of anime style and classic 1930s science fiction from the West.

You can see more of Robert Kim's work on his blog and his Deviant Art gallery

via Concept Ships

Called "A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)," by the artist Caleb Larsen, the imposing cube has a mind of its own, literally:

Hooked up to the internet, it will put itself up for sale every seven days. Right now — the auction lasts until Thursday — you can land it for just north of four grand. But a week later, the cube will offer itself up for sale again.

It seems to be for real: That is, this thing comes with a legal contract binding the collector to facilitating the sale, and apparently this robot artwork is supposed to change hands every week — forever. Is the how AI begins? With a self-selling bot?

And the Q+A certainly on the seller's page makes it seem like this artist is in it for the long haul:

Q: How would you handle the contingencies of ebay shutting down/going under? It seems difficult to maintain the "perpetual" state of auction for more than a few millennia.
A: The contract and the piece were designed to be platform agnostic to accommodate for this. If eBay dries up and disappears, then another platform, either propriety or public, can be used for the selling.

Whatever it is, the thing looks rigged to defeat mere mortals. It's either something out of the future, or the twisted mind of William S. Burroughs — maybe both.

via eBay

Mahru-Z, the four-foot-tall robotic helper developed by KIST, can make toast, pick up stray objects, and load and operate a washing machine. It can also find its own way through the rooms of a house, though it walks with a painful, hesitant gait that suggests a night of hard drinking. The Mahru-M model, an earlier version created by the same team, is a bit more graceful, using wheels to get from place to place.

Robotic maids have been around for a few years now, but the Mahru-Z is said (by the people who made it) to be the best yet at approximating human movement. This may not be as much of a selling point as the developers believe, based on the clip linked above, so it's also worth noting that Mahru-Z is relatively autonomous. It can navigate the house without any direction or oversight from its owner, and it can perform certain chores without having to be told.

Sadly, neither Mahru model has been made commercially available yet. However, given other recent developments in the domestic-robotics industry (link may be NSFW), it wouldn't surprise us if the Mahru-Z line got fast-tracked through development. When you're busy having sex with your sexbot all the time, those dishes have a tendency to pile up.

Popular Mechanics editor Erik Sofge writes:

Despite its fame, or because of it, the uncanny valley is one of the most misunderstood and untested theories in robotics. While researching this month's cover story ("Can Robots Be Trusted?" on stands now) about the challenges facing those who design social robots, we expected to spend weeks sifting through an exhaustive supply of data related to the uncanny valley-data that anchors the pervasive, but only loosely quantified sense of dread associated with robots. Instead, we found a theory in disarray. The uncanny valley is both surprisingly complex and, as a shorthand for anything related to robots, nearly useless.

At the heart of [Masahiro] Mori's proposed valley is a witch's brew of cognitive dissonance. It's the familiar colliding with the alien. Our primal instincts want to welcome the android into the pack, even while other evolutionary instincts tell us to bash its head with the nearest bone. As highly advanced human beings, we do neither-we stare wide-eyed, our brains sputter, and we leave comments on YouTube calling a robot "creepy."

Mori's paper sounds like a revelation, an academic's articulation of the robot creep factor that so many of us experience. It's a compelling argument. But from the skeptic's perspective, the uncanny valley is a surprisingly easy target: Throughout his entire career, Mori never presented data to support his proposed graph. "It's not a theory, it's not a fact, it's conjecture," says Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT. "There's no detailed scientific evidence," she says. "It's an intuitive thing."

In other words, we have no idea whether people will always find humanoid bots "creepy" or if we'll get used to them once they're ubiquitous. I wonder if, 200 years in the future, people will study the theory of the uncanny valley the way people today study quaint theories about superior and inferior races from the nineteenth century?

via Popular Mechanics

Alterio will be giving all the money raised to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), a French group that provides emergency health care in areas that need it. He writes:

Robots + Monsters has been fortunate enough to secure the very limited drawing time of many amazing contributors from the illustration and visual arts world, like Adam Koford, John Martz, Matt Rebholz, and Molly Crabapple, as well as many others, who will all be helping out for this great cause.

OK . . . I want a cyberdragon with giant, black wings that have claws on them (dude!), armor made of black diamond (yes!!), and a breath weapon that's like part-acid, part-fire, part-poison, and part-cosmic rays (awesome!!!!!!!). Ahem. What I mean to say is that this is a great way to give money to a good cause and get a cool picture out of the deal too.

via Robots + Monsters

Image is "Doc Tug," by Joe Alterio, drawn for a previous charity drive.

When Karek Capek chose the Slav term for labor, "robota," (instead of the Latin root "laborus," which he considered) for the word "robots," he anchored them for all time in a particular moment in Soviet/German history. Until the 20th century, writes Smith, the concept of artificial life had often been seen as one of realizing freedom and spontenaiety. But in the past 100 years, artificial life forms have come to be seen as laborers, and intrinsically not free (unless they rebel, of course.)

And Smith explains how Kraftwerk's early classic music video "The Robots" (over at his site, but non-embeddable) is a work of retro-futurism harkening back to the 1930s:

Look at the microphones and the haircuts and the shirts and ties. These all represent something we are familiar with from German cultural output of that era, something you might call the 'seventies thirties guy', that is, the guy who is clearly in the 1970s, in reality, but who is understood to represent someone in the 1930s, perhaps his own grandfather. In fact, in spite of the 1970s technology on display, here Kraftwerk more compellingly channels the early 20th century than any other film image from the same era that I can think of (and certainly more compellingly than the characters in the Nazi films of Fassbinder or Visconti). Why though are they channeling the early 20th century? Much of the best German art that issues out of the intense efflorescence of creativity between roughly 1968 and 1982 (only to come to a screeching halt after that) is driven by a concern to work through the legacy of some of the most ensorcelling visions of the future that were entertained in the immediate pre-war period.

The whole thing is well worth checking out, even if you're not a fan of German techno music. [Justin E.H. Smith]