Thanks MIT!!! Now we can't set up small barriers to stop the robots from making their advances.

Not to mention it is a "robotic cheetah"... good luck out running that.

Actually the survivability isn't completely known either. There is a good theory that I heard about the K–Pg Extinction which stated that surface temperatures reached about 700 degrees Fahrenheit about 2 to 8 hours after the impact. The theory is that the asteroid threw a ton of earth into the atmosphere, which all then began to fall back to the earth, which created the temperature change almost completely around the world. This explains the death of all insects, the death of all plankton and why all fossils stopped being found for about 10 million years after this occurred.

If this actually happened today, people could survive the impact, the temperature change (being underground previously allowed mammals to survive) , but the overall climate change that would happen for the next 5-10 years, would be very difficult to survive. All plants caught fire previously and that smoke along with the dust from the impact and the volcanic activity that would happen afterwards, would cast a cloud that would make it very difficult for anything to grow for quite a while after it. Not to mention the fact that the fires and lack of plants would severely deplete the oxygen levels around the world. Human survivability would depend on how prepared we were, but also how long the earth's surface is uninhabitable after the impact, if it is longer than 5 years, I don't see how we could survive.

I am an American and I like football (and I am not a Patriots fan). But the science here is merely measuring PSI on footballs and testing it under different temperatures and pressures. This set of testing could have been done by a 13 year old. It is nothing new, nothing that technological or challenging and it most likely will have little to no impact on anything other than giving news stations and websites something to talk about for a few days. Oh the Patriots might get a fine, or possibly lose a draft pick.

And the summary has no mention of any specific science or technology here.

Why is this story here?

What is next a Real Housewives story?

I come here for news, not for a reference to a youtube video that everyone has seen.

Cosmos wasn't a series. It was like a mini-series, it ran its course and was done.

More likely about 4 hours afterwards, and after you could have read about it on every other site...

60 minutes had a story as well about a modified version of the polio virus being used to trigger an immune system response to the cancer cells. It seems (maybe I am just overly optimistic) that more progress is beginning to be made against cancer, since the introduction of chemo and radiation therapies.

Uranium has to be mined (most likely using similar circumstances) as well. Most everything that we use and dispose of has an environmental impact.

The real point of this is the fact that China doesn't have better environmental protection laws. The US had issues like this up until the states and the EPA began to regulate environmental impacts. The Cuyahoga River fire was a good example of why we began to clean up our act in the US.

But the reason that I quoted that line is because windmills, solar, nuclear and geothermal are good sources of electricity that our going to lower CO2 emissions and hopefully slow the human environmental impact on the world. All of these can cause a negative environmental impact, if done in an unregulated environment, but they can all hopefully improve the environment as well.

Maybe because of the vast amount of charity work he has done in the past two decades. His work (not specifically himself but experts that work for him) on malaria, HIV, vaccines worldwide, and other huge issues here and in the third world.

Even if you hate Microsoft, why would you completely ignore his charity work?

Yes, but little wholes in the canopy are hardly enough to map the area and most likely not anywhere near enough to find more than a couple mines in areas that probably have at least hundreds of mines.

A LiDAR sensor returns the data from any solid object it hits. This will not work, especially in dense jungle areas like LAOS. Is this just bad information (using something other than LiDAR) or just a stupid idea?

One way that this can be reversed and not negatively affect consumers is if there is a ton more competition in internet access. Most places that I have lived have one or if I was lucky two internet carriers. I don't want satellite and I want a better connection than a DSL connection so my only option is to go with a cable company that provides internet services.

So until there is real competition around the country this needs to be classified as a utility.

I sure can't wait for 2010 for this to happen. I expect we will have flying cars by then as well.

Robot Hell only exists for those that believe in Robotology.