From the “Hey-This-Is-Pretty-Gross” Department:

“Doc­tors at Chimkent Children’s Hos­pi­tal in Kaza­khstan orig­i­nally believed Mourat Zhanaidarov was suf­fer­ing from a cyst.

But dur­ing surgery, they dis­cov­ered he was in fact car­ry­ing the dead foe­tus of his twin brother.

The foe­tus* had devel­oped into a tumour but was found to have hair, nails and bones.”

*Make note of the word foe­tus as it’s appar­ently spelled this way in Europe.

Read this absolutely dis­gust­ing, yet inter­est­ing arti­cle here.

Some fish­er­men out there will catch a fish and non­cha­lantly toss it back into the stream mut­ter­ing to one­self, “Eh, it doesn’t feel anything.”

“Anglers take note ? British sci­en­tists say that after years of debate, they now have proof that fish feel pain.” (MSNBC​.COM)

Read the arti­cle here.

Accord­ing to the MIT Kismet project site, “Kismet is an expres­sive robotic crea­ture with per­cep­tual and motor modal­i­ties tai­lored to nat­ural human com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels. To facil­i­tate a nat­ural infant-caretaker inter­ac­tion, the robot is equipped with visual, audi­tory, and pro­pri­o­cep­tive sen­sory inputs. The motor out­puts include vocal­iza­tions, facial expres­sions, and motor capa­bil­i­ties to adjust the gaze direc­tion of the eyes and the ori­en­ta­tion of the head. Note that these motor sys­tems serve to steer the visual and audi­tory sen­sors to the source of the stim­u­lus and can also be used to dis­play com­mu­nica­tive cues.”

It’s not Furby, that’s for sure.

View more infor­ma­tion on this excit­ing advance­ment in robotic technology.

In sim­i­lar news, Busi­ness 2.0 has a won­der­ful arti­cle on Six Tech­nolo­gies that will change the world. Project Kismet has already evolved into a new robot called Leonardo who accord­ing to the arti­cle is already in dis­cus­sion to imple­ment into spe­cial effects in movies. It’s reported that Stan Win­ston is highly inter­ested in this advanced stage of robotics.

Now all they need to do is cre­ate a home ver­sion of Kismet or Leonardo.

This Fri­day.

X2.

’nuff said. *woot*