'Terminator'-style cube robots swarm and self-assemble

Robotics researchers at MIT show off the capabilities of small cube-shaped robots with no external moving parts.

The M-block with its innards and flywheel exposed.

If you look down and see a series of colorful cubes crawling toward you, don't panic. It's not Tetris come to real life, but rather the creation of robotics researchers at MIT. The M-Blocks robots are cube-shaped modular bots with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they can move, crawl over each other, and self-assemble.

The secret to the robots' movements lies under the skin. Each little cube hides a small flywheel that can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute. Magnets embedded in strategic locations help the M-Blocks stick together.

The current M-Blocks are about the size of wood alphabet blocks, but one goal is to miniaturize the technology. MIT likens the potential resulting microrobots to the liquid-metal androids from the "Terminator" movies. These could end up being the ultimate Transformers, with massive groups of robots altering their shape to suit changing needs.

Watching the radio-controlled M-Blocks move is fascinating. They spin, jump, click together, and fly off each other. The researchers hope to eventually turn the blocks into autonomous robots that can make their own decisions about how they turn into different shapes. Let's just hope they don't develop sentience and start making up their own shapes geared for overthrowing the human race.

Zuckerberg: Let's make the Internet 100x more affordable

Working with his Internet.org partners, Facebook's CEO outlines what needs to be done to drop the cost of Web access worldwide.

Two-thirds of the world's population doesn't have access to the Internet, and this is something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a coalition of tech companies want to change. Their goal: Bring the Internet to every single person on Earth.

While the partnership between the companies, dubbed Internet.org, was announced last month, Zuckerberg released a video on Monday explaining how the coalition aims to bring the Web to nearly 5 billion new people.

"Our plan is to make basic Internet services affordable so that everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy," Zuckerberg said. "In order for this to be economically feasible we need to make the Internet 100 times more affordable."

To bring down the price of Internet service, Zuckerberg suggested a combination of lowering the costs associated with infrastructure and the amount of data used.

To cut infrastructure costs, he said, cell phone towers need to be upgraded so signals can travel further, spectrum needs to be used more efficiently, and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered. For data, he said that apps should cache data instead of request it and that compression algorithms should be used.

The Internet.org coalition partners include Facebook and a number of mostly mobile tech companies such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung. At its launch, this group said it plans to bring Web access to the unconnected world by focusing on a small number of goals, such as affordability, efficient data use, and backing new business models.

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released last week looked at the 15 percent of people in the US who still don't go online. According to the study, one of the contributing factors that limits people's access to the Internet is affordability.

"When I was getting started with Facebook, I could build it because I had access to the Internet and a few basic tools that gave me what I needed to build it for the world," Zuckerberg said in the video. "If we can get to a point where everyone around the world has access to those same tools, then everyone is going to be able to benefit from the innovation and ideas and hard work of billions of people around the world."