Popular Science Blog - iRobot Arms Bomb-Inspector ‘Bots With Tasers
One law down, two to go? iRobot, manufacturer of the Roomba vacuum, has teamed up with Taser to arm its Packbot robots with stun guns. But it’s hard to say whether this is actually a violation of the first of science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Clearly, arming a robot with a stun gun is the first step towards breaking that rule. But the Packbots, currently used as bomb inspectors in Iraq, are remote-controlled. If there’s a human operator standing at a distance with his finger on the Taser trigger, is it really the robot that’s doing the harm? Yeah, probably. But please discuss.—Gregory Mone

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I want these robots to have real guns.  How are we going to get serious on terrorisms or crime if this thing has get to 5 feet from you to do anything to you.  Might as well make it a RC car with an LED laser.

Popular Science Blog
You’re walking down the street, and you know something isn’t right. People keep giving you that look. Is your fly unzipped? Hilarious “Kick me” sign taped to your back? Perhaps people are just staring at your brand-new video belt buckle.

Yes, that’s right. No longer is the giant brass Texas-shaped clasp the pinnacle of belt-closure fashion. Now we have the EgoKast—a belt-mounted video player that displays music clips, slideshows of photographs or ripped DVDs on a 3.5-inch screen mounted right above your crotch. The wearer of the EgoKast (“Disclaimer: This gets more attention than some people can handle,” warns the device’s Web site) can load video, music and photographs via the built-in SD-card slot. If you’re feeling a bit more modest, unclip it and use it as a standard portable music and video player.

I personally can’t imagine someone walking down the street with a color LCD screen on their belt buckle broadcasting highlights from the recent family vacation to SeaWorld. But rocking a waist-mounted 50 Cent video in the club? That just might work. —Carla Thomas

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Something to buy for your friend that can’t figure out what kind of buckle to wear.

Popular Science Blog
The Internet may be referred to as the “information superhighway,” but a better analogy might be an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop. Check out this colorful new Internet map (click the image to enlarge) from physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and you’ll see what we mean. It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web. At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs. The trouble with being on the periphery is that your data must travel through the congested center, which is sort of like flying through O’Hare on your way from New York to Los Angeles. Basically, it’s really inefficient. The researchers don’t offer much in the way of solutions but say their model will help scientists better track the evolution of the Web, which in turn will help people innovate ways to make it less like a lollipop and more like, well, a superhighway.

If want to learn more about the map and you’re undaunted by math speak like “k-shell decomposition,” “percolation theory,” and “fractal geometry,” download the paper. —Nicole Dyer