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Humanity is well on its way to a real-life Terminator uprising
The recent release of Terminator: Dark Fate saw both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton reprise their iconic roles and James Cameron's return as a writer and producer. While the sentient killing machines depicted in the Terminator franchise are comprised of CGI and Hollywood special effects, plenty of real world research is going into developing robots with similar capabilities, just without the murderous intent (we hope).
MIT's new material opens the door to squishable, shape-shifting robots
Robots tend to be either very rigid or very soft, but neither extreme is ideal; ideally, machines could both squish themselves into tight spaces and remain sturdy for strength-dependent tasks. They just might, thanks to a team-up between MIT and Google's Boston Dynamics. The two have developed a composite material that can switch between hard and soft states on the fly. The design mates a compressible foam inside with an external wax coating. If a robot needed to deform, all it would have to do is soften the right joints with a bit of heating. It could even heal damage by heating and cooling an affected area.
Google makes sure its founders will survive a Terminator assault
The Connor family may be doing a great job preventing Skynet from becoming self-aware and declaring war on humanity, but Google apparently isn't taking any chances. The internet giant has quietly uploaded a "killer-robots.txt" Easter egg file that tells Terminators to avoid hunting down the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There's more to this joke text than stopping murderous automatons from the movies, of course. It's really there to mark the 20th anniversary of robots.txt, the document you put on a site to exclude pages from Google's search crawler. However, it does make us wonder why Google didn't see fit to save people like Andy Rubin or Sundar Pichai -- surely it would expect those behind Android to get some mercy from androids.
The Queue: Hu-Man dwarf haters club
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. If you haven't seen the movie represented above, go do it. Right now. Okay, no, you can wait until after you've read The Queue. Then go watch it. sammyboy4 asked: Will we ever see a second BlizzCon in Europe? It seems that people living in Europe or other areas have a long way to travel to get to BlizzCon in the States and it costs a good amount of money to get there.
