It’s nice to see that the morphing robot has come such a long way since July.

We have a spiffy little interview with Zenta, The Man Himself, which you may peruse if you care to do so.

Everybody congratulate Bentern on scooping Pop Sci, then tell him to GET BACK TO WORK.

Delusions of Self-Immolation coats the skin of the willing volunteer in flame-resistant gel, then sets them on fire. Sets. Them. On. Fire.

This is the secret wet dream of the misanthropic deeply morbid machine-art loving soul of this author. It is goddamn beautiful.

From an interview with the artist:

There are three states on the machine which I call “rare”, “medium”, and “well done”. “Rare” means you survive without any wounds. “Medium” is more for, say, the SM session or for people who like pain to understand parts of life, or to have this experience of pain. The third possibility is death. It is possible to die in this machine; I just have to change the liquid, and I have to change the timing.

There is nothing that will make you feel more alive than art that can kill you.

[via the always superlative We Make Money Not Art and the lovely @evacide]

Wired’s Eric Smalley has an awesomely titled article about a Massachusetts based startup, Harvest Automation, is testing a small farming robot to work in nurseries in the horticulture industry.

The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Thank you Wired!

Via The MSNBC Future of Tech site

Well said, Morskoiboy.

The contraption he’s built allows anyone to create crazy cocktails depending on what you type:

The man, the mystery, the legend explains:

So, if you’re interested, let me explain this contraption and the mechanism that makes it work. At the top of the machine there is a slot into which a bottle with alcohol, water, or even milk can be screwed. The essence of the art here lies in the ability of the syrups or liqueurs to tint the neutral color of the liquid.

…

Pressing the buttons on the keyboard injects the corresponding ingredients into the display, which tints different segments of the display and thus produces letters. You can try to imagine that each letter can have a taste (L-Lime, A-Apple), a color (R-Red, G-Green), or a name (K-Kahlua, J-Jagermeister).

Props to http://www.morskoiboy.com/

It’s really hard to say anything snarky about that, it’s just beautiful,and still works. Boggles the mind, really.

Actually, yes. Yes it can. In a good way though.

Maywa Denki the Japanese robotics consortium that defies description (which is how we like it) instituted the Bacarobo competition in 2008.

The rules are simple: The robot has to have absolutely no practical function, it has to be mechanical, and it has to make people laugh. Sounds like Robot Comedy Gold to me.

Bacarobo Europe is happening in October in Budapest. If you are headed in that direction around that time, you should definitely seriously consider attending. For Science!

A new installment to the Deus Ex series has been released, and to celebrate the launch Rob Spence was commissioned to report back on the current state of bionic prosthetics.

Rob Spence lost his right eye and replaced it with a video camera, earning the self-proclaimed cyborg the nickname of Eyeborg!

The video contains a good deal of game footage of Deus Ex: Human Revolution in order to compare the cybernetics in the game to their closest real counterparts.

DISCLAIMER: Skip to 0:16 if you want to avoid footage of Rob Spence’s eye being operated on.

Enjoy:

We <3 Robot Japan so flippin’ hard, we are eager for their presence at RoboGames 2012!

Thanks Robots Dreams!