Giant Freakin Robot

With Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi adventure Elysium looming on the horizon, badass exoskeletons have been at the forefront of many of our minds lately. They’re awesome. And because we’re too lazy to go to the gym—I mean, I don’t have time to go to the gym, sure—don’t we all want some cool mechanical assistance to help us pick up all the heavy things we lift in a given day?

All of us lazy slobs are in luck, because science has given us the Titan Arm exoskeleton. A group of engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania are behind the project, which recently took home second place in the Penn Engineering competition. Built on an aluminum frame, the prototype is powered by an electric motor and rigged together with a series of cables and pulleys. There’s even a comfortable, ergomatic hand control. It goes without saying that that’s also a surprisingly epic hype video the team cobbled together.

Chile’s Atacama desert is home to the super-powered Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the grouping of giant antennae which team up to become the word’s strongest telescope, and it will almost definitely be worth every bit of the $1.5 billion it cost to set it up. But instead of possibly looking for aliens, Atacama is also known for harboring one. Or at least what some people took to be an alien skeleton.

The strange skeleton was the promoted center of the pseudo-documentary Sirius, which was released on April 22, but it had a former emergency physician at its center. Real life has Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, who analyzed the six-inch-long skeleton with a team of colleagues. They used X-rays, hi-res photography, DNA sequencing, and computed tomography scans.

“Oh, and there ain’t no such thing as aliens or Men in Black.” But unlike Will Smith, I’m not lying to you. What Nolan and his team found is damned near as interesting though. The tests show the skeleton belonged to an extremely deformed human, and what’s more, the gender-unknown being was six to eight years of age at the time of death. What the fuck is that about? They aren’t sure just yet. The skeleton had only had 10 ribs, instead of the normal 12, and there were skull and facial deformities consistent with turricephaly, or the conehead syndrome.

The ancient city of Teotihuacan, located about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, is one of the most intriguing places on Earth, as far as its history goes. Established circa 100 B.C.E., it was once one of the greatest cities in the world, with a population that reached around 125,000 people at its peak, and a landscape full of pyramids. In the 1970s and 1980s, a tunnel system was found beneath the Temple of Quetzalocaot — or the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, for the more exotic among you all — and while it was partially explored and mapped out in 2003, its most recent developments have been the most amazing yet.

And it’s all thanks to a Smallish Freakin’ Robot named Tialoc II-TC, named after Mexico’s god of rain. The three-foot-long, 77-pound Tialoc-II entered the tunnel last week, rolling through sludge and mud to reach the end of the tunnel, where archaeologists expected to find another chamber, similar to the ones at the mouth of the tunnel. Only the robot found three of them, thought to be burial chambers, as all these things generally are.

If someone asked you to make the smallest film ever to exist, how would you go about it? Would you use a GoPro camera with part of its lens blocked, filming ants carrying grains of salt over a half-dollar? Or would you film something as normal and then release it on a ridiculously small disc? Well, if you’re at IBM, you make a short film by blindly shifting individual atoms around, like bulbs on a Lite Brite, for the most scientifically sound stop-motion production ever. And because the plot is slightly less complicated than the title of a Curious George book, we’ll just stick to the background for this.