If you had your own giant robotic arm, a love for racing and way too much time and money on your hands, I’m sure you would do the same as the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. And by “The Same”, I mean “turn the robotic arm into the world’s most awesome arcade simulation of F1 Racing ever”. Cue the video:

It was developed in order to try and simulate proper F1 conditions without having to put millions of pounds worth of car onto an excessively expensive race track and risking life and limb. Really, I think it was more an excuse to be put on the end of a robotic arm and moved about, and quite frankly it’s not hard to imagine 8 of them networked together down the local arcade.

Now… what happens when you crash in-game…?

[IEEE Spectrum]

As we all know, sooner or later the robots will rise and take over the world. We will be dominated by a super-intelligent global network (or “SkyNet” as I think of it) controlling a robotic army…

Sadly there are humans whom just cannot see that they are directly helping the future enemy by constructing our worst fears: highly mobile and capable robots. Take for example Takeshi Maeda’s OmniZero.9, which in his demo shows that it is potentially faster moving than Asimo thanks to giant wheels, and is capable of human capture transportation.

Our days are numbered. I just hope that we can build the Orca VTOL Assault Craft to deal with this menace before things get out of hand…

[via Engadget and Takeshi Maeda]

From the department of “I can’t afford robots, damnit!” comes a papercraft Wall-E that moves when there’s a new mail. Just watch it!

I know it’s cutesy to the point that it’s ideal for kids, but I actually want one of these things. If it were on the market as official merchandise, I’d get it, if only as it’s a decent competitor to the Nabaztag.

Oh, if only I had papercraft skills. And motors. And wires. And the ability to solder. And the free time…

[From Let's Make Robots via Engadget]

Nvidia’s Nvision 08 has now ended, and obviously there were many technical and graphical things on display at the event that many people in the computing world would care about. Graphics card and CUDA related stuff mostly. [Here endeth the "technical" part of the post...]

Among the other events were a live Diggnation, a lanparty and Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters. As in those guys that throws a dummy into a burning vehicle full of explosives to see if the moon landings really happened (Or at least I would guess, I haven’t seen that episode yet so I can only speculate on what experiments they would end up doing to prove or disprove that).

The Myth-Duo had decided to show the difference between a CPU and a GPU using a medium known for expertly demonstrating such technical changes: paintballs.

Video after the jump…

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And now filed under “I should have placed bets on this happening years ago…”

Nasa’s Phoenix lander has unearthed compelling evidence of ice on Mars, mission scientists believe.

Chunks of a bright material found in a trench dug by the craft have disappeared over four Martian days, suggesting they have vapourised.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mars probe makes 'ice discovery']

Phoenix, using it’s scraper shovel type thing, uncovered some white stuff on the ground. 4 days later, parts of it had gone, and since salt and cocaine doesn’t just disappear (unless some random famous person known for drug abuse happened to be on Mars at the time…) it has to be water.

They found the bits in the Dodo-Goldilocks trench (Who names these important things?!) and some more similar features at Snow White 2 (Seriously, who does it!?), which makes me wonder how long it will be until the Google Copernicus Center will be fully operational on the surface instead of on the moon where it was originally planned…