The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute representatives announced they have finished developing an AI able to pass an avatar version of the Turing test (to convince a person that it is human by communicating in a virtual environment like Second Life). They named the bot “Rascals”, which stands for Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems. As you would have expected, this achievement will require a great deal of technical resources, and the team will be using Blue Gene, the world`s fastest supercomputer from IBM, to run the AI in real time. …

Do you remember Google’s contest? Yeah, you do - it’s the Lunar X Prize which could bring $20 million for the winning team. In order to win this competition, the team will have to send a craft into space and land it on the moon, then the rover will transmit specific data to Earth, move 500 meters and then it would have to transmit the same data to Earth.
This quest has to be completed by the end of 2012, after that the award decrease to $15 million and to nothing …

Scientists got a new job for robots: they will replace the animals used for testing chemicals. This was the idea of the National Institute of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency, which think that by using robots they will reduce the number of animals used for tests, costs and time. According to Dr Francis Collins, the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the robots will test the chemicals on individual cells of some animal or even human organisms. He also said that the tests done on animals are …