We're not entirely sure that you can call a six-legged arthropod a spider, but let's not quibble over biology: this robot looks pretty cool. At the moment about all it can do is poise for attack and track faces using a built-in webcam (and what looks like proprietary face-recognition software), but the designers (high school students David Benhaim and Owen McGarry) assure us that they will be implementing the ability to walk -- and terrify your little sister -- shortly. One thing's for sure: we wish we'd done something like this in high school (they machine-lathed the parts themselves!) instead of playing Ultima and stealing beer... but you can't win them all. Check a video of the bot in action after the break.

France: it's like Canada, only with less hockey, and more boring mechanical spiders. Those hosers have foisted this amazingly-styled and yet utterly dull "La Princesse" piece of street theater on the innocent, unsuspecting people of Liverpool, and the travesty is set to continue for another couple of days. Hit up the read link for BBC's video of the mundanity.

Nope, we aren't sensationalizing anything -- that creature you see above really has made the streets of Liverpool its home. According to an in-the-know tipster, it's reportedly going to be stalking citizens and making all sorts of ruckus, possibly the kind involving pyrotechnics. So what's with England and these totally random stunts? First a full-sized UFO crashes in Potters Fields Park, now a gigantic spider shows up as part of La Machine. Be honest here: are any of you terrified?

[Thanks, Chay]

The fury has really been unleashed over at AMD, as the cats in 2nd place take aim at the pocketbooks lowdown, dirty overclockers. Feeling like getting into it? Then you'll probably want to get your hands on the extra-special Phenom 9600 "Black Edition" quad-core processor, which allows brave souls to tweak (i.e., overclock) to their hearts content by utilizing the company's OverDrive utility. It's not all rainbows and unicorns, however, as these chips apparently contain a bug which under extreme conditions can cause the CPUs to perform in a less than stellar manner. AMD says that it hasn't witnessed any of its production installations exhibit the errata, and that only its internal stress-tests have pushed the processor into the danger zone (cue Loggins). If you're really concerned, a BIOS patch will circumvent the issue, but may suck away 20-percent of your delicious speed. The choice is yours.

[Via TG Daily]

For the first round of benchmarks AMD isn't letting anyone else set up its systems for testing, but that doesn't mean we can't get a decent idea of how the Spider platform's going to perform in the real world. ExtremeTech got to test a machine that AMD set up with a 2.6GHz quad-core Phenom chip, but since those won't be shipping for a few months, they ET also downclocked the chip to 2.3GHz to give us a better idea of what AMD's hit the market with yesterday. The good news is that the sub-$300 2.3GHz chip should perform quite comparatively with Intel chips at a similar price point, but the 2.6GHz hasn't had a solid price set yet, and might have more trouble competing with Intel's GHz-happy line. We won't bore you with the benchmark nitty gritty, and you might want to wait for some true lab-based benchmarks before you make the jump, but it looks like AMD is headed in the right direction.

Just like we heard, AMD has gone live with Phenom. With it, we've got an entire new platform, codenamed "Spider." The Spider PC platform combines AMD Phenom quad-core processors, ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics, and AMD 7-series chipsets with CrossFireX and AMD OverDrive software for what AMD calls the "Ultimate visual Experience." That's the hype. Early reviews, however, are pretty much "underwhelmed" by the launch. Oh, the HD 3800 cards are ok (for mid-range graphics) and the 7-series chipset "is in good shape," but AMD needs to roll-on those clock speeds beyond the 2.2GHz Phenom 9500 ($251), 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 ($283) and 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz Phenon 9700 and 9900 (available in Q1 2008 for $300 and $350, respectively), and do it quick, if they hope to pull ahead of Intel's quad-core offerings. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem likely.

Read -- AMD Spider press release

Read -- PC Perspective benchmark
Read -- HotHardware benchmark

Although you may expect all of WowWee's creations to start to bleed together at some point, reviewers over at PC Mag would be quick to deny such a claim, as it deemed the Roboquad a creature "unlike any toy or robot it had seen before." In a few hours of at-home testing (you know, with rambunctious children), it managed to get everyone involved and keep them from bouncing off the walls, and while controlling the critter wasn't always simple, it's "Autonomy" mode proved most exciting anyway. Overall, the Roboquad fits best into families where unusual and unique are commonplace occurrences, and if you think your offspring (or yourself, it's okay) could spend hours on end tinkering with a robot akin to a "drunken crab," WowWee's latest just might be worth your $99.

In what we surely hope isn't the opening salvo of the robot insurrection, a 45-year old Danish municipal worker was tragically killed by an industrial robotic lawnmower this afternoon, after the unit tumbled off a slope and onto the poor fellow doing his job. Although we've seen quite a few robotic lawnmowers, we're not too familiar with the RC-controlled Dvorak Spider 01 unit the man was using; our only hope is that this is, of course, an isolated incident.

Joining the Land Walker, Robotic Giraffe, and the Anchorage Mecha as some of the most exotic, over-the-top ways to get from point A to point B is the Mondo Spider, which required a team of skilled engineers and "thousands of hours" in order to assemble. The creators seemingly spared no cost on the mechanical arachnid, as it boasts an impressive array of gears, linkages, and sheer quantities of metal to bring it all together. The man-driven beast cranks up like your average vehicle, but slipping it into first gear gets the spidey's legs a-crankin', and before long, it actually gets up to a respectable pace and commands respects from anyone close to its path. It may not shoot rubber balls or pass a state inspection, but we can't imagine too many vehicles standing up to this intimidating monster. Catch the videotaped demonstration in the links below.

[Via Wired]

Just what we need: an invention to make the robotic armies that will one day surely turn against their creators better scramblers. Regardless of future impact, researchers at the University of California and Pennsylvania University are envisioning "leg spines" that would allow robotic creatures resembling insects and spiders to scramble across gap-ridden surfaces much better than they currently can. The scientists carefully watched slow-motion footage of arachnids dashing across wire mesh and noticed just a 22-percent slow down from running across solid ground. Apparently, the little buggers are able to distribute their weight just so across their myriad of legs, so that there's usually one leg that catches another's fall and prevents the creature from getting too caught up. This biological method is being applied to robotic limbs, assisting crawling creatures to make it across less-than-ideal conditions by utilizing mechanical feedback. Look, we're down with eight-legged freaks, we're just not so fond of these things possessing an inhuman ability to track us down should a case of mutiny sweep the robotic world.