DARPA has said it wants a 10-gram aircraft with a 7.5-centimetre wingspan that can explore caves and other hiding places, relaying GPS data and images to base. It will need to fly at 10 metres per second and withstand 2.5-metre-per-second gusts of wind.

Aeronvironment has released video that shows its "nano air vehicle" (NAV), which is the size of a small bird or large insect, hovering indoors without such crutches and under radio control. "It is capable of climbing and descending vertically, flying sideways left and right, as well as forward and backward, under remote control," says the company.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17608-hover-no-bother-for-flapping-nano-aircraft.html

There are now more than 7,000 UAVs ranging from the workhorse, the Predator, and its beefier, deadlier kin the Reaper, to army drones like the tiny hand-launched Raven and the larger Shadow.

UAVs are credited with killing more than half al Qaeda's top 20 leaders.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants more UAVs. Already he has said that the next generation of fighter planes -- the F-35  -- will be the last manned fighter aircraft.

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF, explains that the next phase will enable a single drone to provide as many as 60 simultaneous live video feeds directly to combat troops. Some new drones will be as small as flies, others walk -- all appear destined to work with decreasing human input.

"The future of how you use these un-manned systems or remotely piloted systems is really unlimited," says Deptula

Robotic warfare expert Peter Singer, who advised President Barack Obama's campaign team and has authored "Wired for War," says that remote warfare is changing mankind's monopoly on how conflict is fought for the first time in 5,000 years. All that limits its advance is its application, not the technology.

more than 600 Hellfires fired by Predators, over 95 percent hit their targets

Singer cites other instances when a computer fault has turned robotic warfare into a mass casualty event. "Last year in South Africa an anti-aircraft had a 'software glitch' during a training exercise," he says. "It was supposed to fire upwards into the sky, instead it lowered and it fired in a circle and killed nine soldiers, all because of a software glitch."

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/07/23/wus.warfare.remote.uav/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column - repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

"It's a new brain," he explained. "The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

"It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ."

To make the model come alive, the team feeds the models and a few algorithms into a supercomputer.

"You need one laptop to do all the calculations for one neuron," he said. "So you need ten thousand laptops."

Instead, he uses an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program sophisticated robots is sponsoring research into surgically implanting microchips straight into insects as they grow, intertwining their nerves and muscles with circuitry that can then steer the critters.