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Monday March 12, 2007
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 Robots that serve tea and perform surgeries inside our bodies are what the future has in store for us. But robots aren't developed just for futuristic reasons; they're also developed to give us a key to the past. European scientists have built a robot "with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics" the first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean, which might have looked like a salamander.
The "salamander robot" is almost a yard long, made out of nine bright yellow plastic segments containing a battery and microcontroller. It walks across floors, on the beach, and swims. The team, led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland, wanted to develop such a robot in order to figure out how amphibians were able to switch from swimming to walking on land. I wonder if this robot can also demonstrate the regeneration of lost parts? [Photo: CNN; via CNN]
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