Food for thought as carnivorous robot is born

created by naked_ape
(idea) by naked_ape (2.6 mon) (print)   (I like it!) 2 C!s Thu Jul 20 2000 at 15:37:52
A robot that eats meat?
Are you talking of our beloved EDB?.

Nope!
This is for real, Chew Chew the "gastrobot" is a 12-wheeled train-like robot that runs on a microbial fuel cell, breaking down food with bacteria and converting it into electrical energy.

Some quotes from the inventor, Stuart Wilkinson of the University of South Florida in Tampa, as appeared in Yahoo News (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000719/sc/robot_dc_1.html):

"The ideal fuel in terms of energy gain, is meat. Vegetation is not nearly as nutritious"
"Changing food into electricity isn't unique. What I've done is to make it small enough to fit in a robot."
Wilkinson jokes about the dangers of giving gastrobots a taste for meat:
"Otherwise they'll notice there's an awful lot of humans running about and try to eat them."
How about "you look tasty"?
The title of this node is the same of the article from Yahoo News, but I find it worth of Everything. Maybe the journo is an E2 user?
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