Sandia National Laboratories have officially made our video games dreams and nightmares come true at once by creating the homing bullet. Finally, all our Contra cosplay will be perfectly authentic!

So, how does this homing bullet work? Most bullets have rifling, grooves that ensure they spin. That spin keeps the bullet straight and not tumbling. The homing bullet instead has fins that allow it to correct its course and slam right into your liver, killing you horribly.

Doing those course corrections? An eight-bit computer using an optical sensor to track a laser the target’s been “painted” with. It can change course thirty times a second, meaning if you’ve got that laser on you, it’s going to find you. As you can see from the photo at right: that’s one of these bullets fitted with an LED to track its course changes during a test firing.

It’ll be a while before this hits the market, but we’re not far away from a world where any idiot can shoot at you and hit you. Maybe between now and then we should look at keeping certain types of ammo off the market, U.S. Government, what do you say?

[ via the homing pigeons at Wired ]

image courtesy Sandia National Laboratories

Why, yes, we intentionally went out of our way to write the weirdest headline we could think of for this news story, but it’s 100% true. A bunch of Canadian scientists, specifically the guys up at the Nanorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, have figured out how to make certain bacteria do their bidding.

It works because the bacteria are “magnetotatic”, which means they swim in the direction of a magnetic field. So it’s fairly easy to manipulate them into moving around small blocks of epoxy and get them to build simple structures.

This may sound pretty goofy and pointless, but it’s not. This is actually a major step forward for nanotechnology. This is a proof of concept: we can actually do the stuff that heretofore was limited mostly to cyberpunk novels and hand-wringing by fundamentalists who barely grasp how robots work but can understand the term “gray goo”. Now it’s just a matter of making it effective. Check out the video under the jump and marvel at how kinda gross the future looks.

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