RUBI and QRIO, two humanoid robots, are attending nursery school to help researchers improve the ways robots and humans interact.

This is way cool: famous two-dimensional artworks made three-dimensional via Photoshop. (Via By the Way…).

…and the future looks bright for private suborbital spaceflight. Alas, there has been nothing new from the Da Vinci Project, Esterhazy, Saskatchewan’s, hope for becoming a spaceport, for some months, although at least the Web site is still there…

I finally turned in my children’s biography of Orson Scott Card, which I’ve been working on off and on (mostly off, due to a variety of conflicts and problems) for roughly the last 97 years (subjective time) to Enslow Publishers, and I’d just like to say…Woo-hoo!

There aren’t very many substances which have been both manufactured in the sands of ancient Egypt and in outer space. In fact, off-hand, I know of only one: glass. Glass is an “amorphous solid”– its molecules don’t form a strict pattern, like the molecules of steel or granite, but are jumbled together like more like …

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If you haven’t yet visited the online gallery of the first annual Art of Science competition at Princeton University, do so now.

Here’s a handy guide to how long77 foods, beauty products and household goods will keep. Apparently those 20-year-old olives we recently uncovered should be thrown out. Who knew? (Via By the Way…)

I had an excellent Father’s Day…and you can plainly see why.

And there goes the already dubious scientific rationale for a whole raft of science-fiction time-travel stories.

How’s this for the science fiction headline of the day? Within one generation you might be able to “teleport” a solid, 3D representation of yourself over the Internet. Shades of David Brin’s “Kiln People,” although the consciousness would reside in only one person, the original. Combine this with consciousness copying, though…

…with this defense of science fiction, especially when she writes: “I have written two works of science fiction or, if you prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” No nonsense about science fiction being about “talking squids in outer space.” Good on ya, Margaret.

Here’s a great idea: rockets that are hauled aloft by an airplane to an altitude of 10 to 13 kilometres, dropped (on a parachute) and then fired once they’re vertical. Such rockets could take astronauts into orbit much more cheaply and safely than now. There are a lot of new space-related developments bubbling away beneath …

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