Flesh Eating Robots

Because of my recent interest in autonomous, biologically inspired robots, my friend Tami sent me some fascinating links about designs and concepts for future flesh eating robots.

From New Scientist, furniture that captures vermin and uses the biomass to power fuel cells that run small electronics:

From Wired, Human corpse powered robots being developed by the Defense Department:

From the file marked "Evidently, many scientists have never seen even one scary sci-fi movie": The Defense Department is funding research into battlefield robots that power themselves by eating human corpses. What could possibly go wrong?

Since they apparently don't own TVs or DVD players, researchers at Robotic Technology say the robots will collect organic matter, which "could" include human corpses, to use for fuel. But if you picked up anything on flesh-eating robots over the years you know they'll ignore that tasty soybean field and make a chow line right to the nearest dead body. And, if the machines can't find enough dead people to eat, they can always make new ones.

There are also designs for yeast that grow on glucose from human blood to power medical devices like pacemakers, robots that seek out and eat flies as an energy source, and swimming robots that survive on energy derived from plankton in the water. Possible? Scary? Amazing?