Word: robotics
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Researchers at Tokyo University are pursuing an even more ambitious goal. Working under Iwao Fujimasa, an artificial-heart specialist, a team of 20 scientists is building a robot less than 1 mm (0.045 in.) in diameter that could travel through veins and inside organs, locating and treating diseased tissue. The group hopes to build a prototype within three years for testing on a horse, but the researchers first must obtain gears, screws and other parts 1,000 times smaller than the tiniest available today...
...talks. He walks. He does push-ups. He sweats. And he is almost inhumanly brave. Well, strike the almost. Manny is a robot, though with a body temperature of 98.6 0 F and a chest that heaves with each "breath," he is astonishingly lifelike. Come October, he will wade into clouds of nerve gas, which his owner, the U.S. Army, would never dare subject a real soldier to. Manny's mission, at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, will be to test protective clothing -- for example, to determine whether walking, bending or sweating might cause the clothing...
...Mars mission is 2020. That allows plenty of time for a measured approach and spreads the expenditure over a sensible period. It also gives NASA ample opportunity to choose the next goal after Mars -- exploration of the asteroid belt, for example, or a manned trip to the outer planets. Robot probes would have to study the Red Planet in depth first. One, the Mars Observer, is scheduled for a 1992 launch, and others would have to follow...
Admittedly, we have gained knowledge about our planet and our solar system, but the question is by no means settled as to whether we could have accomplished the same using robot craft...
...Commerce between the two countries, which fell 36% from its peak in 1984 to a total of $8 billion last year, has lately begun to pick up again. Gorbachev was especially taken with demonstrations of the high-tech wizardry that abounds in West German industry. In one factory a robot poured glasses of a local wine for a toast with Baden-Wurttemberg Minister President Lother Spath. Gorbachev repeatedly encouraged West German industrialists to participate in joint ventures in the Soviet Union. Said he: "Those who look ahead and take calculated risks are doing the right thing...