If there's one thing I love more than octopuses, octopodes and octopi (all of which are perfectly acceptable pluralizations of the word octopus, thank you very much), it's pedantry. And good grief, does Phil Plait ever serve up a whopping helping of the stuff in reaction to today's Earth-Day themed Google Doodle.

Unsatisfied with the crawling, writhing, coiling and climbing abilities of their existing hoard of robotic snakes, members of Carnegie Mellon University's Biorobotics Laboratory have gone and given their mechanical serpent a brand new talent: the ability to wrap itself in a stranglehold around pretty much anything…

When Wired posted its list of "The World's Most Annoying Technologies" a few weeks back, "The Most Useless Machine" (a box with a toggle switch, which, when flipped, causes a mechanical nubbin to emerge from inside the box, flip the switch back, then retreat back inside the box) didn't even get an honorable mention.

Using an augmented reality app and a 3D rendering of the TARDIS's interior (as it appeared between 2005 and 2010), tech writer Greg Kumparak took an already-impressive model of The Doctor's time&spacecraft and endowed it with perhaps its most commented-upon feature: an impossibly spacious interior.

More than one billion people around the world call themselves members of the Catholic Church, but as of December 8th, only 546,765 of them were following Pope Benedict XVI on Twitter (nom de tweet: @pontifex). Here's how Catholicism's truly faithful followers are spread out around the world.

Add this to your ever-growing list of things you never knew existed but now desperately need: a BNSF rotary snow blower. The video up top is of a model currently in operation clearing railroad tracks in Aurora, NE, but you'll find them all over the country, churning through formidable heaps of tightly packed snow…

In 1956, on an episode of then-popular game show "I've Got a Secret," 96-year-old Samuel J. Seymour tottered out on stage, sat down gingerly beside the program's host, and proceeded to blow the audience's mind. Over ninety years earlier, he had witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Washington D.C.'s Ford…

You've got to hand it to Nicole Lazzeri and her colleagues at the University of Pisa for creating the robot you see here. Its facial features are some of the most dynamic and convincing we've seen yet — but something's still a little off.

Feel like you need a visual ringtone for some of your friends? Marvel have got you covered - they've teamed up with mobile company Vringo to offer a new set of video ringtones showcasing Disney's favorite heroes.

The command "Jump to it, soldier" will have an extra meaning to it next year, when the US army takes delivery of an all-new, all-hopping robot to assist in "intelligence gathering," and maybe more.