Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders--which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets, or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. "The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals," he says. Biologists already know spider brains aren't like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners.

Hi, my name is Samantha, I love you, a lot! That's the first thing she says to me when I "meet" her. Samantha is a sex robot. With blonde hair and blue eyes, perhaps a little larger than life in some areas, she is programmed to skip the small talk and get straight to the point. It is the home of sex-tech engineer Dr Sergi Santos, who says he is creating the first sex robots with artificial intelligence.