Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning.

Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire. ..

Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise, who some of you may know as the creator of the grizzly bear-proof suit and fire-resistant paste, claims to have built a device that sees through walls.  Doc Brown-style, Hurtubise says he saw the entire device, called the Angel Light, in a dream and built it without any blueprints or schematics.  He later showed the device to representatives from the French government who were so impressed they gave him $40,000 on the spot to finish it.  After talking to some contacts at MIT, he also discovered that the device could also detect stealth material and cause electronic devices to stop working (or, so he says).  And, like any good mad scientist, he tested the device on himself.  Sticking his hand in front of it, he claims to have been able to see muscles and blood vessels, but now says he has no feeling in a finger on that hand.   Ah, the perils of science.

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar...

SHENZHEN: Two women have been identified as carrying a mutant gene that is immune to HIV/AIDS, the first such cases uncovered in China, a researcher said.

The finding is the joint effort of a research programme, "Association of Human Genetic Polymorphisms with HIV Affections," jointly conducted by the University of Washington in the US State of Washington and local Infectious Disease Hospitals and medical institutions in Guangdong Province. ..

Frank Drake, creator of SETI's famous equation, says the detection of extraterrestrial radio signals won't work, because Earth's own radio signal will only be around for 100 years. More and more of Earth's communications use cable and satellites, with no radio-frequency leakage to space. Instead, we should be looking for intentional signals in the form of high-powered lasers that could 'outshine the sun by a factor of 10,000'. Meanwhile, Paul Davies writes that we should be conducting SETI in our DNA. In turns out that an alien message designed to last millenia should be 'inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions', otherwise known as living cells. Are we the message?

The Solar System could be unique amongst planetary systems in the Universe, astronomers have announced...

JERUSALEM - A young monkey at an Israeli zoo has started walking on its hind legs only — aping humans — after a near death experience, the zoo's veterinarian said Wednesday...

This composite image obtained from NASA (news - web sites) was taken by the Stardust spacecraft during its 02 January, 2004 flyby of the comet Wild 2. Several large depressed regions can be seen. Comet Wild 2 is about five kilometers (3.1 miles) in diameter. To create this image, a short exposure image showing tremendous surface detail was overlain on a long exposure image taken just 10 seconds later showing jets.(AFP/NASA-HO)...

NEW YORK, June 16 (UPI) -- Two separate research teams have demonstrated teleportation of information using atoms for the first time, scientists reported Wednesday.

The novel trick someday could help information flow inside quantum computers, machines that in theory can run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe...

Human stem cell lines from genetically flawed human embryos have been created by US scientists...