I thought this article was a bit strange. Of the four or five videos posted, only one was a self contained two legged walker (the well known asimo). The others involved various specialized wheel systems. Even asimo relies on static stability. In fact robots (even legged ones) have been climbing stairs for at least 15 years. I remember in the early 90s the society of automobile engineers sponsored a contest for _undergraduate_ engineering students to develop legged robots that could traverse various obstacles -- One of them being a set of stairs. Every year several of the entries were able to pass that test. The more interesting recent developments are with dynamically stable and self contained robots that can climb stairs and traverse other obstacles. This really is a new development in the last 10 years. The most crazy cool example of this I've seen recently is the big dog.

This process would produce tons of useful nanoparticles (like nanotubes, buckballs etc) but it would be mixed in with a lot of 'junk' molecules. Once / if an efficient process for separating and sorting the good stuff is developed, this would be a real gold mine.

I thought the realtime blender plugin was a very cool project and quite effective. It implemented a sandboxed version of blender's richly featured 3d game / interactive simulation engine within several browsers on multiple platforms back in 2002 http://www.linux.com/feed/20866 there have been rumblings of reviving the project and bringing it in line with the current code base now and then on the blender developers mailing list. most recently by Marcelo CoraÃa de Freitas

Actually it seems like the stock fell ~12% because they missed earning estimates for the quarter. The mood with respect to CEO change seems somewhat ambivalent. Ruiz was not popular with investors and largely blamed for running the company into the ground by not solving production problems. Some blog post level comments seem to suggest that bringing in Meyer as CEO is a mistake. Anyone from AMD / ATI out there want to pipe in on the mood in house? --snip-- ""From 2001 to 2006, Meyer led the companyâ(TM)s microprocessor business, overseeing related R&D, manufacturing, operations, and marketing." Right. Forget Ruiz, _THIS_ is the guy who is responsible for AMD's sorry state. Responsible for the horrible marketing. Responsible for manufacturing problems. Responsible for the failure of K10 (aka Bulldozer aka Core-killer aka the architecture which should have been 10h which should have kept AMD on top which should have arrived a while ago but won't for another two years). They really should have promoted somebody from ATI or the outside or, I don't know, ANYONE but Meyer. Sigh. "