No, not another soccer-and-robots story. Traditional locomotive systems in robots, like wheels or legs, often add unconvenient size and bulk and make them unsuitable for areas in which humans also roam. The Ballbot, recently developed at Carnegie Mellon University, stands human-height and human-wide on a single ball, enabling it to navigate the same spaces that people use and look pretty striking at the same time.

In Japan, plans are afoot to roll out a workforce of robots to carry out menial tasks and transportation duties within the next decade or so. A lot of big technology names have signed up to the ‘CIRT’ group, along with Tokyo University, and the government is pitching in for half of the research bill, in the hope of ameliorating the problems of an increasingly aging population. But if there aren’t enough people to work at looking after the elderly, who’s going to make these robots? There could be some big outsourcing involved here.

New evidence seems to demonstrate that the ‘Googlearchy’ of bigger sites reaping all the benefit from search engines is a myth. Data from Alexa and other sources has been used to show that search engines in fact help direct traffic to the smaller sites too – the more specific the search, or the content of the site, the more pronounced the effect. Good news for the little people, and for the Long Tail hypothesis.

Here’s another answer to the excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – why don’t we just hide the stuff away in deep sea sediments? The proponents of the idea claim that even an earthquake wouldn’t release it. Disregarding the issue that it does nothing to address the release of greenhouse gases and merely sweeps the problem under a metaphorical carpet, and also the potential of raised sea levels doing what earthquakes cannot, there is one obvious flaw – won’t it take a lot of energy to extract the gas and pump it a few miles beneath the ocean?

The US wants the supercomputing crown back, having only just lost it to Japan after a decade of being top dog in instructions-per-second. The Energy Department is inking a deal with supercomputer experts Cray to build a petaflop computer in 2008. The resulting machine will not just provide more processing power for big science simulations, but its construction will develop novel methods of problem solving and software development.