If the boxy Opportunity rover could elicit years of anthropomorphized love and goodwill, then surely Earthlings will warm to the idea of sending a snake-shaped robot to the moon. This robot--the brainchild of students at Northeastern University--is meant to wiggle across difficult terrain, measure water in the pit of craters, and bite its own tail to become a spinning ouroboros tumbling down the side of a lunar cliff. NASA's annual Big Idea Challenge presents a new query each year that's geared toward an engineering problem the agency needs to solve. In fall 2021, students from universities across the United States set out to design a robot that could survive extreme lunar terrain and send data back to Earth. The winning team, of students from Northeastern's Students for the Exploration and Development of Space club, took home the top prize in November and now hope to turn their winning design into an advanced prototype that could actually be sent to the moon.

Robots that can swim underwater are nothing new. For instance, Carnegie Mellon fitted its famous snakebot with turbines and thrusters earlier this year to give it aquatic capabilities. But few can do so with the grace, speed and effortlessness of a real-life fish. And it's not that scientists have avoided trying to create a robot that can do just that, but the exact way fish swim faster or slower is something that has proved elusive. Marine biologists have known for a while that the secret lies somewhere in the way they can alter the rigidity of their tails.

Last week, a visitor slithered through the IEEE Spectrum office. The robotics company Sarcos had brought around its new snake robot, the Guardian S, to show off its moves. While it performed its tricks--shimmying sideways, rolling over, rearing up, and even sliding its magnetized body straight up a metal door--an impressed staff member mentioned that his son would love to have a snakebot to play with. "We're taking orders if you want one!" said Sarcos CEO Ben Wolff. Of course, the Guardian S isn't meant to be a pet or a plaything; the applications Wolff rattles off are in the realms of industry and security.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by a society of mindful bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer and MIT professor, died on Sunday in Boston. Dr. Minsky, an IEEE Life Fellow, made numerous seminal contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, exploring, among other things, how a better understanding of human cognition could lead to advances in machine intelligence, and vice versa.