If you've read the novel "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, or if you've at least seen the movie, you know how important viruses were in the story. Thing is, viruses have a less dramatic - but no less important - role to play in real life, according to scientists. It has something to do with how they relate to cyanobacteria. More "viral" news spreads after the jump.

Here's one spy plane that would make a real cool Autobot (or Decepticon, come to that): the US Air Force Research Lab has come up with a plan for a small spy plane to recharge its batteries from power lines. And since it's a spy plane, it can also "morph" to look like... well... something that isn't a plane so that anyone who'd spot it would think it's... something that isn't a plane that's perched on a power line. More in the full article.

Boris Shustov, a Russian astronomer and director of the Institute of Astronomy, reported the possibility of the Apophis asteroid becoming a threat in 2029 as it crosses Earth's orbit. This was announced in a recent press release by the Novosti new agency.

Don't expect Bruce Willis or any other heroic astronauts to try and blow up the asteroid, though. Shustov said that doing so would likely cause more harm than good. Instead he proposed using a micro-satellite to nudge it into a safer orbit instead.

He elaborated the plan saying: "To blast an asteroid, as some hot shots suggest, is quite an unpredictable step, and a more cautious approach is welcomed now."

The predicted impact is estimated to be even more powerful than the Tunguska asteroid that hit Siberia during 1908. Considering that the Tunguska event contained a force about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, this could spell dire news for the planet indeed.

 

There's strength in numbers. This bit of wisdom has been proven time and again by bees and ants - those social animals that pack a lot of punch in crowds of themselves, albeit being tiny as individuals. At the University of California in Berkeley, electrical engineers bank on this idea by making flea-bots that could make an impact in swarms.

The collective term for the swarm of flea-bots is Smart Dust. It's supposed to be composed of flea-sized two-legged robots that could jump up to 30 times their size. Such groups of miniscule bots could be used to look for survivors in a rubble after an earthquake, or create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemical substances, for example.

A team of electrical engineers at UC Berkeley are hard at work in pursuit of their Smart Dust dream. Former grad student Sarah Bergbreiter leads the way in developing autonomous robots fabricated by the same technology used to make integrated circuits. Currently, the prototypes are these solar-powered microbots 8.5 mm long and less than 4 mm wide. MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) is the key to the microbots' locomotion.

To put it simply, the microbots move through a method similar to the way a person climbs a ladder, repeatedly engaging a shuttle that pulls a flea leg forward and then engages it again to move it a bit more. There are plans of making the microbots smaller and integrating wings on them, but these will come later.

We've always thought of robots as big, lumbering machines. It's a novel idea to come up with a group of tiny robots that could still function after one of them fails.