A spillover from last week’s Cyborg-a-thon, Wired has put together a list of the top 10 cyborg videos. But not everything is about fusing man with machine.

As you can see in the sample videos above, sometimes we choose to make bionic monkeys and insects. Truly, it’s the weirdest of the weird sciences. Check out Wired for the complete list. [Wired]

Remember handwriting? We have all but abandoned it, but the torch is being taken up by robots like Kuka, who has been put to work writing out copies of the Martin Luther bible. [BotJunkie]

Developed by Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge, Adam the robot was the first machine to independently discover new knowledge.

Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesised that certain genes in baker’s yeast code for specific enzymes which catalyse biochemical reactions in yeast. The robot then devised experiments to test these predictions, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results and repeated the cycle.

The results of the experiment were later replicated and confirmed by a team of human scientists. So, it appears that computers are not only doing our calculations, but they have begun thinking for us as well. [Scientific Blogging and Gizmodo]

Are you lactose intolerant? Do you have frequent heartburn or constipation? Perhaps one day your defective digestion system could be replaced with a more advanced version of the Cloaca machine. This thing simulates actual human digestion and, in the end, produces a turd you would be proud of. [Cloaca via Gizmodo]

Dishwashers have been around for decades, but we still have to physically put the dishes into the machine. This is completely unacceptable. Panasonic’s robot takes care of the entire cleaning process from start to finish. [Gizmodo]

Seriously, what don’t smartphones do for us these days? At the most basic level, these phones are how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves and how we gather information. Thanks to apps, smartphones are taking on even greater roles — like helping us keep our girlfriends happy without actually having to do any work. Girlfriend Keeper sends automatic texts and emails to your significant other depending on the intensity of your relationship. [Girlfriend Keeper]

If you are tired of your co-workers being promoted over you, just wait until a robot becomes your new boss. JAST or the “Teamworkbot” has the ability to observe and mimic human behaviour. As you will see in this video, JAST already knows how to complete the task, so it observes the human’s actions, anticipates his next move and dresses him down when he gets it wrong. [Gizmodo]

I’m pretty sure that allowing robots to take a critical role in surgery qualifies as crossing a Rubicon with respect to our level of trust in machines. The Da VInci robot enables a surgeon sitting at a console to control movements and equipment with greater precision — resulting in a procedure that is minimally invasive. [Wikipedia]

It’s only a matter of time before technology becomes advanced enough to allow lazy parents to turn over the duties of child-rearing to robots. In fact, it’s already happening in Japan where robots like Tmsuk babysit kids in shopping centres thanks to RFID badges. They even have robot teachers like Saya that terrify elementary schoolchildren into doing their work.

The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) was developed by MIT to help drivers navigate, bitch about their driving when necessary and keep them company on long trips.

“When it merges knowledge about the city with an understanding of the driver’s priorities and needs, AIDA can make important inferences,” explains Assaf Biderman, associate director of the SENSEable City Lab. “Within a week AIDA will have figured out your home and work location. Soon afterwards the system will be able to direct you to your preferred grocery store, suggesting a route that avoids a street fair-induced traffic jam. On the way AIDA might recommend a stop to fill up your tank, upon noticing that you are getting low on gas,” says Biderman. “AIDA can also give you feedback on your driving, helping you achieve more energy efficiency and safer behaviour.”

[MIT via Gizmodo]

While the AIDA robot helps you navigate, there are plenty of engineers working on cars that do all of the driving for you. Chevy’s “Boss” Tahoe is one of the higher profile projects that have come out in recent years, winning the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 after successfully navigating a 100km course littered with obstacles. [Technology Review]

James’ MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) is based on a machine-learning concept from back in the 1960s, and frankly I’m not really surprised that I’ve never heard of it before. The idea behind the “machine” is that the 19,683 possible noughts-and-crosses board layouts are condensed into a mere 304 (due to how many are “rotationally identical”) and a selection process for moves is put in place. The best part, of course, is that the machine “learns” as the operator adds beans for winning moves and thereby provides indication as to what has worked in the past.

It’s a pretty neat low-tech idea, but I think I’ll stick to playing a human opponent. [Flickr via Short Term Memory Loss via Boing Boing]

What goes in must come out, or at least that is the case for the Cloaca (which we originally posted about last February), a machine that literally produces a good old Number Two. Designed by Belgium artist Wim Delvoye and first exhibited in 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the machine was fed twice a day and then the digestive process simulated resulting in this beauty:

After the machine is “fed,” the food is ground up. Digestive juices (acid, etc.) are added and, after a spell, the machine pushes out a nice (somewhat solid) doodie. Want to see it in video?

And for the more mobility inclined, the Mini Cloaca is way more portable, though it can only consume a small meal. Either way, we’d be remiss in our Taste Test if we ignored the ultimate food…errrr poop machine. [Cloaca via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Taste Test is our week-long tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Unlike Roombas and the ASIMO that require specific charging docks to refuel their power, the PR2 uses the standard 3-pronged electrical outlet for its power source.

Although it takes Willow Garage’s PR2 58 minutes to complete its mission, it managed to barrel through 8 doors—maneuvering itself around junk scattered all over an office space—and find 9 different electrical outlets to recharge itself. If all the outlets were being used, I wonder if the PR2 is smart enough to figure out how to yank out other plugs for an empty socket. [Willow Glen via Robots.net via Technabob]

Gort and Caprica 6 pulled out victories in the final round of the Heavyweight and Humanoid division battles. Just for fun we are pitting them against one another in a final, championship round. Which machine is the deadliest of all-time?

Stay tuned later today for a special bonus round between two loveable robots completely unsuited for combat. The question of the century will finally be answered.

This tournament poll of the world’s deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-arse robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Survival Research Labs has been re purposing hardware into giant, deadly displays of machine power since 1978. They say the plank hurling Pitching Machine is their most dangerous made during all that time.

It’s basically a machine that uses the power from a 500 cubic inch El Dorado engine power wheels, which launch six foot long pieces of 2″ by 4″ lumber over 190 kilometres per hour. That’s fast enough to penetrate an eighth inch of steel plate. Even better, this machine uses an autoloader that can run through its 20 board clip in 10 seconds. An oldie, but a goodie. Thank god its not a computer controlled bot. [SRL]

I’ll keep the spoilery bits to a minimum.

The two shots here with Marcus are snagged from the trailer. They’re from the most ludicrous scene in the movie—which is ludicrous for many, many reasons—where Marcus strolls into the central Skynet control centre. The white, glossy room—the standard motif for the heart of the machine—hosts a computer system with an advanced user interface (a lot like Iron Man’s) displayed on massive glass monitors. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

Why the hell would Skynet’s control room be designed with an ultra-polished user interface for people to use? Or have a comfy chair for Marcus to hurl at the computer? They’re machines! Even though some of them are built to mimic poeple, they don’t need multi-touch, superslick graphics, floating heads to explain the entire plot or monitors the size of a wall like meatbag people do. They can just plug in, or as seen in the movie, sync via the optical terminal Marcus and other terminators use, which actually makes sense. Or communicate wirelessly. In binary. Or whatever.

You could argue, I suppose, that the entire setup was constructed just for Marcus—it has to have been built after Judgment Day, since the rest of the city is ruins—but even the prison blocks are designed with interfaces for humans to interact with. Wouldn’t Skynet want to make it as hard as possible for people to figure out how talk to machines, so John Connor can’t hack them in 30 seconds with his Sony Vaio?

Skynet’s not as advanced as The Matrix, sure, but you’d think it’d realise designing and building things around people paradigms is pointless and inefficient, since um, there shouldn’t be any people around. That’s one thing The Matrix gets more right than Salvation: The machine world, architected and built by machines—who are slavishly devoted to logic and efficiency—would be just for machines. Not people.

I know on one level it’s stupid to complain about things that don’t make sense in a science fiction movie, but added on top of everything else going on in Terminator: Salvation, it’s one of the major points that shit all over my suspension of disbelief. [Giz's Terminator: Salvation Review]

Made to reassure the public about the safety and quality of McDonald’s meat, this tour of one of their meat providers’ factories is interesting, partly because of the complex, bewildering preparations that the beef patties go through and the amazing machines that do the work, but mostly because of how much the procedure resembles that child-grinding scene from The Wall.

The video has it all: masked employees earnestly voicing the virtues their “USDA-inspected” product while behind them, a torrent of beef spews out of a giant mechanical meat-hole onto a speeding conveyor belt; tubs, pipes and boxes of various sizes and shapes carrying a roiling mass of beef slurry; countless, mysterious processing chambers, each of which does who knows what else to the patties.

The final step of the process: after all the processing, grinding, forming and freezing, the last device the patties pass through before packaging is a metal detector. In other words, go to McDonald’s, because your Big Mac is practically guaranteed not to have a lug nut in it.

It’s not that this is necessarily surprising, it’s just that we’re used to companies keeping this kind of thing as out of view as possible. So some credit is due to McD’s, I guess? Witness all the mechanical wonder/horror here. [McDonald's—Thanks, Albert!]