Before you ask, yes, the robot actually does ingest matter and excretes it out. Scientists working at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory invented a robot that powers itself by ingesting food and water, digesting it and then releasing the leftover waste just as a human does.

“Robots that eat biological fuels could find enough fuel almost anywhere,” John Greenman, a scientist at the laboratory, told SA. “There is organic matter anywhere on Earth — leaves and soil in the forest, or even human waste such as urine and feces.”

The robot is called EcoBot and has been around since 2003. The first EcoBot fed off of E. coli bacteria that fed on refined sugars. The EcoBot-II used sludge microbes to digest dead flies, prawn shells and rotten apples. The latest model, EcoBot-III, is the robot that dumps the leftover waste it “digests.” If it didn’t do this, the robot would become poisoned by its own waste and stop working.

The scientists claim that these robots can keep operating for upwards of 30 years as long as they have food to eat.

The team has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their work. They hope to turn the robots into a machine that can tackle both sanitation and energy needs in poor countries that need it the most.

NASA is also eyeing the technology for extended space travel. If the robots can survive off of human waste, they would be the perfect companion for astronauts traveling to distant planets like Mars.

Fortunately for humanity, the robots can only perform tasks in short bursts before needing to recharge again. Once the technology improves, however, we can expect robots to eat everything on the earth in their tireless domination of the human species.

[Original lead image courtesy of NineInchNachos’ flickr]

One particularly interesting element to the story was that Richard DeVaul, of the “Google X” team was involved. Google X, is Google’s mysterious lab, the existence of which was revealed by the New York Times back in November. The NYT described it as a “top secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free.”

Google has posted some videos of presentations from the event:

Google has also put up a blog post about the event. Co-hosts Astro Teller & Megan Smith (who co-hosted the event with Eric Schmidt) write, “These are efforts that take on global-scale problems, define radical solutions to those problems, and involve some form of breakthrough technology that could actually make them happen. Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10x improvement, not 10%. That’s partly what makes them so exciting.”

“At least a few times a year, we hope that people will take a few hours or a day or two out of their busy schedules to dare to push the boundaries, and to consider moonshot approaches to some of the world’s many unresolved challenges,” they say. “Solve for X isn’t about developing a new business line or building an investment portfolio. Rather, it aims to be a forum where technology-based moonshot thinking is practiced, celebrated and amplified.”

There’s no mention of the Google X lab, but we have to wonder how many of these “moonshot” ideas are being tossed around in there. And how many involve robots?

As Robert Lanza, M.D. of Wake Forest has a very interesting article, where he explains that as children we are taught that the universe is divided into 2 entities; ourselves and everything outside us. The humanistic mind sees this as logical, relavent. Things we can control, often ourselves give us a feeling of superiority, which makes us forget momentarily about the universe. For example: I can control my fingers, but I cannot turn your head left or right without physically touching you; we are individuals in control, that represents the line between self and non-self.

Take for example when an amputee loses a limb, the piece is missing, but for some reason the subject can still “feel” his or her missing apendage. One explanation is, the brain still perceives, even amongst the diminished limb, it as there.

“I think, therefore I am” this is a crude phrase for one of the most basic principles of philosophy; all knowledge, truth and principles of being, must begin at the individual sensation of self. The subject of the sense of self has been covered by many writers, philosophers and religious groups. These groups believe that there is an independent “self”.

Flip the script and the opposite of this is felt when your thinking ceases. Many people have had an almost out-of-body-experience in moments like watching their child play. Some fully realize this sensation and others may shrug it off as just a silly feeling. “Day-dreaming” we call it. The individual is momentarily out of conventional thinking or humanistic mindsets; it’s beyond common existence. You get that feeling as if you’re not actually there, but things are so much more clear and you are, in fact, physically in reality, but your consciousness is elsewhere.

Now, you may ask yourself where is this plane of outward existence? It’s a fascinating topic, which Lanza explores in depth in his essay.

Spider silk is a versatile material. For example, the single thread the spider uses to drop down, pull it and it stretches, but with no outside forces acting on it, it stiffens to its original state.

How does this work? You may ask, well, According to one source, during the elastic stage of the web, the proteins in spider silk are pressed into finite folded structures. So when the spider decides to drop, the structures unfurl, when the folds are gone, the proteins reconfigure into the tough structures referred to as beta-sheet nanocrystals.

Scientists performed a study to see how molecular properties impact the entire web. So, a group of researchers sought out a a basic web built by your every day casual spider. With the spider still on the web, the team hung tiny metal wires on the web to simulate an insect caught in the web. When they pulled the wires, the individual spokes of the web broke, but the other threads, acting as almost support structures, didn’t break.

The results of the experiment really show off the unique ecology of these arachnids. Spider silk is one of the most scientifically interesting natural materials. Other creatures that spin silk, such as silk worms, their silk is made to be more stretchy than anything. A spider’s silk, however, can be elastic and incredibly strong at different times.

Needless to say spider webs are incredible structures and a useful hunting tool for the creatures. The architecture and pure aesthetic beauty of the web is just an added bonus. Spiders may be creepy to you, but they sure are smart arachnids.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech have published a study today that looks to investigate how much of Twitter is worthless.

“If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users,” Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and lead author of the study, said.

Even though there are 200 million tweets being sent per day, nobody really ever cared to tell users how useless their tweets are. That’s why the researchers created “Who Gives a Tweet?” which sought to collect reader evaluation of tweets.

Over a period of 19 days, over 1,000 visitors to the site rated over 43,000 tweets from the accounts of over 20,000 Twitter users they followed.

The readers liked 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent. Another 39 percent caused no strong reaction.

“A well-received tweet is not all that common,” Michael Bernstein, a researcher on the team, said. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

Tweets that were part of someone else’s conversation or updates about mood or activity were the most disliked.

Tweets that included questions, shared information or self-promoted creative works were the most liked.

The researchers put together a few tips for those who want to be a successful Twitter user:

Old news is no news: Twitter emphasizes real-time information. Followers quickly get bored of even relatively fresh links seen multiple times.

Contribute to the story: Add an opinion, a pertinent fact or add to the conversation before hitting “send” on a link or a retweet.

Keep it short: Followers appreciate conciseness. Using as few characters as possible also leaves room for longer, more satisfying comments on retweets.

Limit Twitter-specific syntax: Overuse of #hashtags, @mentions and abbreviations makes tweets hard to read. But some syntax is helpful; if posing a question, adding a hashtag helps everyone follow along.

Keep it to yourself: The cliched “sandwich” tweets about pedestrian, personal details were largely disliked. Reviewers reserved a special hatred for Foursquare location check-ins.

Provide context: Tweets that are too short leave readers unable to understand their meaning. Simply linking to a blog or photo, without giving a reason to click on it, was “lame.”

Don’t whine: Negative sentiments and complaints were disliked.

Be a tease: News or professional organizations that want readers to click on their links need to hook them, not give away all of the news in the tweet itself.

For public figures: People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details.

The researchers hope that their work leads to personalized applications that filter out unwanted tweets.

They go on to say, however, that some users may put up with bad tweets out of a personal obligation. It’s an online extension of having to attend extended family gatherings even though your cousins are social rejects that make you feel horribly awkward.

“Social media technologies such as Twitter pose questions regarding privacy, etiquette and tensions between sharing and self-presentation, as well as content,” André said.

What’s your definition of a worthless tweet? Let us know in the comments.

TED will be holding public auditions in 14 countries – Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Tunis and Vancouver – between April and June 2012 in order to discover new talents and ideas that have the potential to change the world. Once auditions have been held, TED will be posting videos of all of the presenters so that the publica can vote for the presenters they’d like to see at TED2013. TED will then select the top 50 from those results to include in their 2013 conference.

Among the specific talents that TED is looking for are: inventor, teacher, prodigy, artist, performer, sage, enthusiast, change agent, storyteller, and the spark (someone with a powerful idea worth spreading). This audition will be limited to presenters who have never given at talk at a TED conferende or been invited to one of TED’s many events.

TED is a rich resource for budding polymaths and eclectic tastes. If you’re unfamiliar with what TED does, check out some of the previous talks given at some of their events below.