We've seen Lego robots that do Sudoku puzzles, solve Rubik's Cube, and mimic the human hand. Well, this Lego robot builds Lego models--so far. How long until it starts building other robots out of Lego? Hobbyist Will Gorman built his Lego Mindstorms NXT MakerLegoBot for the ongoing Lego World 2010 expo in Zwolle, the Netherlands. Inspired by the open-source 3D printer MakerBot, the machine is made of more than 2,400 bricks and runs on three NXT Intelligent Bricks and nine NXT motors. A PC running the MLCad Lego design system sends instructions to the printer via USB, and it then starts selecting bricks from its large-capacity feeder system.

A humanoid robot baby has taught itself to shoot a bow and arrow, and all we can say is: Hide the kids and the pets. Assault rifles can't be too far off. Petar Kormushev and his colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology's Advanced Robotics department taught the little guy how to hold a bow and release the arrow. Then, using two algorithms and visual feedback from a camera, the bot learned to aim and shoot arrows, hitting the center of a target 11.5 feet away in only eight tries. The robot behind the bow is iCub, an open-source baby bot developed in Europe to help researchers study child development and cognition.

We jaded old Cravers have seen plenty of dancing robots in our day, but a robot rond de jambe-ing to music from Tchaikovsky's epically tragic "Swan Lake"? Now that gets under our feathers. The robot swan, developed at Sweden's Malardalen University, dances an alternately gentle and dramatic Dying Swan choreographed by dancer Asa Unander-Scharin, who is not a robot. The piece, just over four minutes long, has reportedly moved people to get misty-eyed and use descriptors like "touching" and "beautiful," words not often associated with machines. The robot swan stands about 3.2 feet tall, with 19 joints in its white wings, neck, beak, and feet that give it the flexibility to pull off both smooth and fiery moves as demanded by the choreographer.

A playful child-size humanoid robot with a face inspired by comics and Japanese Noh theater is being used to help teach autistic children social skills. Kaspar (Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robots), developed at the U.K's University of Hertfordshire, has a minimally expressive face so it doesn't "overwhelm" its play partners with social cues, thus allowing them to individually interpret the expressions as "happy," "neutral," "surprised," and so on, as they interact with the robot toy. Makers of the bot--which has been in development for a few years now but is currently on display to the public through Friday at London's Science Museum--deliberately took a low-cost approach to Kaspar so future research or commercial versions would be simple to make and easy to transport with on-board processing and battery power. They built the robot for $2,500 using a child-shaped mannequin for the body's base, off-the-shelf parts, and silicone-rubber RoboSkin with embedded tactile sensors that detect different kinds of touch. Kaspar has minimal motors, only enough to simulate the most salient gestures involved in human communication.

If you think robots are heartless piles of plastic and silicon, you're correct. But soccer-playing humanoid robot Nao has been evolving by developing "emotions" under a European project and is now being used in the U.S. in sessions to treat autistic children. Under the recently concluded Feelix Growing project--aimed at designing bots that can detect and respond to human emotional cues--researchers at the University of Hertfordshire's Adaptive Systems Group and other centers have been trying to get Nao to simulate human emotions. Researcher Lola Canamero and colleagues have been programming Nao--created by Aldebaran Robotics and used worldwide as a research bot--based on how human and chimpanzee infants interact with others. Working with a budget of some $3.2 million, the researchers have been trying to create robots that can be better companions for people.

Let's say I've got this huge industrial robotic arm in my garage collecting dust, and I'm wondering what to do with it. Well, it looks like I can use it to make a bad-ass Ferrari F-1 simulator. I mean, if scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics can do it, why can't I? The project, headed up by Paolo Rubuffo Giordano, is using just such a setup to research how the brain perceives motion. By running simulations and monitoring the players test subjects, the team can amass data on how we deal with movement along six axes. The subject sits in a cabin on a robot arm about 6.5 feet off the ground and navigates a Ferrari F2007 around a virtual track.

If you were going to design a robot to look like a real human being, which famous face would be your model? Would you go for an Angelina Jolie because, well, she's already been Lara Croft and somehow the distance from video game character on your telly to robot in your living room is shorter than the walk to your garage? Or might you prefer a warm-hearted intellectual such as Kanye West, the Marquis de Sade, or Ann Coulter? Well, the University of West of England and the University of Bristol, as part of a project called Human-Robot Interaction, have been working to perfect an (allegedly) human-looking robot. You know, one that can manage a few facial expressions, move its lips, and criticize you day after day.

The tiny motors normally used to vibrate cell phones can provide researchers with a significantly more affordable option for building robots. A team of students led by Alexis Johnson at the University of Southampton's electronics and computer science school realized the tiny motors intended for cell phone vibration are already designed and manufactured to be attached to circuit boards making them ideally suited for use in swarm robots. Using those motors, the group designed a new type of robot platform that brought their material cost down to about $48 (24 pounds) per robot, according to a university announcement Wednesday. Research into swarm robotics focuses on coordinating large numbers of identical robots, often small and compact, to collectively work together. The Southampton team's 25 swarm robots are capable of performing autonomously for up to two hours at a time before needing to be recharged or running out of code capacity.

The expedition in the Southern Ocean found that stocks of krill under the ice were five times more concentrated than those in open waters. The shrimp-like species is a key food for penguins, whales and fish. The importance of sea ice as a nursery for krill has long been suspected. However, these findings are the first large-scale measurements of the breeding ground's existence. The discovery was made by UK scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, the Open University and the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen.

The seeds of the film were sown by celebrated British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss in 1969 when he penned a futuristic tale of a child android given the capacity to love. The short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long set in motion a chain of events that lasted more than three decades and if the final result is considerably different from the origin of the species then one must consider the journey the original idea has taken. "I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now - they were lodged in laboratories," explains Aldiss from his Oxford home. "If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. "The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it - the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love.