Robot Takeover Begins with Enslavement of Camels

It started with chess, and now the robots have taken over yet another beloved human past time, the Sport of Sheiks. Of course, I'm talking about camel racing.

You may think the most disturbing part about this story is that the robots are programmed to whip and bark orders at the camels, or you may think it's the fact that these robots are largely going to replace enslaved children as professional camel jockeys.

But me, I'm going to go with the fact that they dressed them up in little robot dress shirts and jockey hats. Robots wearing clothes is surely a sign of the apocalypse.

US Military Developing Moth-borgs

Yep, our wacky friends at the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are at it again, developing cyborg moths for use in covert reconnaissance. The bugs will be grown from larvae around a mechanical core that will interface directly with the creature's nervous system, creating a remotely controllable cyborg moth capable of transmitting images from a tiny fiber optic camera. I couldn't have said it better than The Register, who astutely noted that that if you swap moths with Austrian body builders, you've pretty much got the plot of The Terminator all set up to happen for real.

This project, Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS), comes from the agency's Microsystems Technology Office. But, if you've got some time to kill, I highly recommend perusing some of DARPA's other publicly disclosed mad science-y projects on the programs page of their Defense Sciences Office. It definitely makes you wonder... if they have all this stuff on their website, what the hell is classified?