Go Forth And Multiply

From an e-mail to me via the ever-readable Evil Pundit, a story via Reuters:

Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.

Each robot consists of several 10-cm (4 inch) cubes which have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.

"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

Memo to budding robo-psychologists: Re Mechanical self-reproduction : never ever tell an entity capable of this to go F... itself, or you might be surprised. Someone better tell Maureen Dowd about the usefulness of males though.