Aldebaran Robotics' Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers, but it now has a proper successor. Aldebaran took the wraps off its new and improved Nao Next Gen robot today, touting features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What's more, while robot's outward appearance hasn't changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions. As before, the robot is aimed squarely at researchers and developers, but the Aldebaran's chairman notes that the company is continuing to pursue its goal of providing a Nao intended for individuals -- a goal he notes is being aided by the contributions from its developer program. Check out the gallery below and the video after the break for a closer look.

To the list of French accomplishments you may now add "robot basketball training" -- at least if the video above is to be believed. But you probably shouldn't believe it when members of Poitiers Basket 86 testify that amusement park rides improved the team's "spatial orientation" and helped them defeat top-ranked Chalon. It'd be different if the "robots" were teaching them perfect free-throw or helping them walk, obviously, but PB86 is known for its innovative advertising, and this seems like a quirky example. Hit the video above to see the pranksters at work, but know that, as with Sartre and Camus, something gets lost in translation.

The global statistics for breast cancer are staggering: 1 in 8 women worldwide will be diagnosed at some point during their lifetime. Women who are diagnosed early have a 95 percent chance of living at least five years after diagnosis and it's estimated early breast cancer diagnosis could save 400,000 lives globally each year, according to the World Health Organization. Fine needle aspiration (FNA) is currently the least invasive technique to biopsy breast lumps, or masses. FNAs are less painful, less expensive to do, result in less complications for patients, and make results available more quickly than the current traditional core or open biopsies. FNAs are currently less reliable in conclusively diagnosing breast cancer than more invasive and painful techniques.

There was a robots competition held in May 2006 where buyers of Tramadol Europe go also. Over 20 entries gave spectators a insight to the field of UGVs and its cutting edge technology including demonstrations of semi autonomous driving.The robots competition was followed by a comprehensive robotics conference which covered all aspects of robot designs from electronics to mechanical devices.. We could find no record of a declared winner but several partcipants have already secured contracts and orders for their inventions.

THE teams competing in DARPA's Grand Challenge (see article) have it easy. The driverless vehicles racing off-road in the Mojave desert merely have to avoid boulders, dunes and the occasional cactus. That is nothing compared with the hazards of the open road. Put those same autonomous vehicles on Interstate 15--the busy road that links Los Angeles and Las Vegas--and they would also have to contend with bleary-eyed weekenders, huge trucks and octogenarians puttering along in mobile homes. Even so, engineers and scientists at a handful of academic and industrial research centres are valiantly grappling with the problem of designing autonomous passenger vehicles, buses and trucks.

PEOPLE commonly attach names to machines, from cars to PCs, especially if they use them regularly. Robots are proving no exception. Floor-cleaning robots get named, as do the bomb-defusal robots that have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when they break down or get blown up, their users have even been known to mourn. Robots are getting more capable in leaps and bounds.

FOR centuries, biology has been an empirical field that featured mostly specimens and Petri dishes. Over the past five years, however, computers have changed the discipline--as they have harnessed the data on genetics for the pursuit of cures for disease. Wet lab processes that took weeks to complete are giving way to digital research done in silico. Notebooks with jotted comments, measurements and drawings have yielded to terabyte storehouses of genetic and chemical data. And empirical estimates are being replaced by mathematical exactness.

IN THE old days, knowing your customers was part and parcel of running a business, a natural consequence of living and working in a community. But for today's big firms, it is much more difficult: a big retailer such as Wal-Mart has no chance of knowing every single one of its customers. So the idea of gathering huge amounts of information and analysing it to pick out trends indicative of customers' wants and needs--data mining--has long been trumpeted as a way to return to the intimacy of a small-town general store. But for many years, data mining's claims were greatly exaggerated. Customer-loyalty cards, which allow retailers to gather information not just about what is selling, but who is buying it, sound like a great idea. Yet Safeway, a British retailer, eliminated its customer-loyalty card when it realised it was gathering mountains of data without being able to use it.

THEY certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world's behaviour through the use of "agents". In this context, an agent is a program that acts in a self-interested manner in its dealings with numerous other agents inside a computer. This arrangement can mimic almost any interactive system: a stockmarket; a habitat; even a business supply-chain. If the constituent parts can be understood, the reasoning goes, some insight into the whole will follow.

IN THE early days of computing, information was put into computers by flipping switches. After this came the relative sophistication of loading programs and data by means of punched cards or punched paper-tape. These were followed in their turn by such devices as the keyboard, the mouse, the trackball, the joystick, the touchpad and the touch-sensitive screen. Throughout all this, speech--the most natural, and perhaps the most effective, interface between people and computers--has remained largely neglected. Apart from some modest developments in software for desktop dictation in the 1990s, the only time most people have talked to their computers has been when cursing them.