BioShock Infinite — which looks pretty awesome — is about to get even more awesome. Irrational Games revealed to G4TV some of the “Heavy Hitter” enemies for the game. What you see above is The Motorized Patriot, a clockwork mechanized George Washington complete with a Gatling gun called the pepper-mill. (Trailer and more pictures below.)

“Unlike most of the enemies, he’s completely fearless,” Irrational co-founder Ken Levine told us. “He doesn’t have a sense of self-preservation, so he’ll just keep coming at you and coming at you. [...] Once he destroys the Patriot, Booker can actually go pick up the pepper-mill and use it as a heavy weapon,” Levine said. “The only place you can get it is from a destroyed Motorized Patriot.” [G4TV]

HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. It’s about time the gaming industry developed a character which truly reflects the nature of our first president. Opponents beware. He makes love like an eagle falling out of the sky. He killed his sensei in a duel but he never said why:

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It wasn’t enough for the bears to steal cars, play hockey, and do other awesome things, now they have also been observed using tools without any training. It’s rare to see tool use in mammals other than primates, yet Volker B. Deecke at the University of Cumbria has observed a wild brown bear in Alaska using a rock to exfoliate:

The animal repeatedly picked up barnacle-encrusted rocks in shallow water, manipulated and re-oriented them in its forepaws, and used them to rub its neck and muzzle. The behaviour probably served to relieve irritated skin or to remove food-remains from the fur. Bears habitually rub against stationary objects and overturn rocks and boulders during foraging and such rubbing behaviour could have been transferred to a freely movable object to classify as tool-use. The bear exhibited considerable motor skills when manipulating the rocks, which clearly shows that these animals possess the advanced motor learning necessary for tool-use. Advanced spatial cognition and motor skills for object manipulation during feeding and tool-use provide a possible explanation for why bears have the largest brains relative to body size of all carnivores. [AnimalCognition via io9]

That dry skin must have been unbearable. Ha ha ha. Seriously though, we’re all going to die.

We wonder if that bear has relatives in Japan:

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The picture above is not the robot cheetah because baby cheetahs are cuter than robot cheetahs. Cute > Accurate. This is one of those equations which differentiate blogging from journalism, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Another one of those equations? Booze > Awards < Free Swag < Free Booze. That’s just science.

Boston Dynamics’ “Cheetah” is also science. This DARPA-funded research yielded a cat-like robot which just broke the land speed record for legged robots by running 18 mph on a treadmill. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set at MIT in 1989. As you can see in the video below, it kind of looks like it’s running backwards, but its movements are patterned after real quadrupeds like cheetahs, horses, and dogs. It flexes its back as it runs, unlike most robots which are too busy plotting human carnage to flex their backs. Your back will flex when I kick you in half, robot scum.

Er, anyway, for the test in the video the Cheetah was tethered to the hydraulic pump which powered it and a boom-like device kept it balanced. Boston Dynamics head Marc Raibert says they’ll be testing a free-running version later this year with an internal engine (gas-powered) and software to maneuver in 3D space. But can they teach it to be as cute as a baby cheetah? No. In your lack-of-a-face, robots.

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Yesterday, Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab presented some of their research at the TED2012 conference. We’ve talked about their horrifying manhacks many times before, like the time they programmed one to play the keyboard. Now, instead of a single autonomous quadrocopter playing the keyboard, Kumar, Daniel Melligner, and Alex Kushleyev have programmed a swarm of the little buggers to play the James Bond Theme.

Each robot quadrotor is eight inches in diameter and about one-tenth of a pound. They work in unison to mimic the swarming behavior of insects, birds, and fish while they plot to destroy us all (probably). For the video below, which screened at TED, the quadrotors played instruments like a keyboard, drums, maracas, a cymbal, a regular guitar, and a modified guitar built from a couch frame. So, when the manhacks takeover the earth, we can at least look forward to the sweeping, dramatic music they can play while hunting us down.

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Awww, guys, don’t fight.

We’ve been covering Jörg Sprave’s work for quite some time. He’s the affable German tinkerer behind such creations as the machete slingshot, the Gatling gun slingshot, the 6-shot slingshot, the circular saw blade launcher, the musket ball crossbow, the zombie decapitator, the slingshot cannon, and the pump-action slingshot crossbow. Now he has a new toy, and — wouldn’t you know — it’s another slingshot.

Sprave’s newest slingshot is based on Usopp’s Kabuto slingshot/spear from One Piece. It has a five-point slingshot on one end and a spear/javelin with a fire-hardened steel spike on the other end to both stabilize the slingshot against the ground and to use for stabbing at close range. We want to be on this guy’s team when the zombie apocalypse goes down.

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How’s this for chutzpah: two bloggers have tracked down the source of Marvel’s pirated comics…and it’s from the pre-press image files. Somebody’s figured out an exploit to get into Marvel’s network and literally steal the comics before they hit print.

We don’t talk about piracy on here, and for good reason: it’s stealing, and it also compromises the long-standing tradition of freeloading in the FLCS and reading all the new issues before buying one and leaving. But this is taking stealing to a whole new level, if it’s true.

Pirated Marvel comics are notable for what they’re missing: UPC symbols on the covers, certain visual elements like musical notes, things of that nature. David Brothers and David Uzumeri break down all the smoking guns they found, but if this is true, and it’s hard to see what else it could be, Marvel’s basically got a omelette the size of Cap’s shield hanging off their face.

Next time, guys, get MODOK to program your computer security; McAfee has nothing on him.

[ via Comics Alliance ]

image courtesy Marvel Comics