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It's not Iron Man armor quite yet, but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has released video of the latest tests of their Warrior Web undersuit, which they hope will one day be worn under soldiers' uniforms and serve to improve their performance. The project is still in its early stages, but DARPA is working to develop solutions that will make soldiers lives easier by more intelligently distibuting the weight of their heavy packs and capturing wasted energy to help cushion footfalls and carry heavy gear.

Today in 'things that will one day squeeze the life out of you after you smart off one time too many to our coming robot overlords' news: this new robotic hand from DARPA. The mechanical limb can grip things as small as a ball bearing, lift objects as heavy as a 50-pound kettle bell, and doesn't so much as flinch when you give it your best shot with a baseball bat.

When the contract you have with your cell phone provider expires you usually get a new phone. Maybe you trade in your old phone, or donate it. You might even just throw it away, but what if instead of any of those options, it simply dissolved? That's the kind of future we could live in soon thanks to the development of "transient electronics." They are devices designed to operate for a set period of time before dissolving, and they just hit a major advance that could see them being used more and more.

It's that time again, folks. Time to watch everyone's favorite headless, suit-testing robot, PETMAN, strut his stuff into hypothetical peril. No, wait -- this time our creepy friend has a head and a gas mask! And not only does he walk, he squats, twists, and turns in the uncanny valley of lifelike creepiness, ensuring a place in your nightmares tonight. Designed by Boston Dynamics, PETMAN is used to "test the performance of protective clothing designed for hazardous environments."

President Obama in his most recent State of the Union speech referenced commitments to science and technology, and shortly after the speech some details of a 10-year study of the human brain came out. The White House today announced the full official plan, calling it the BRAIN Initiative, which sounds like S.H.I.E.L.D's research division, but is now a real $110 million dollar project.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have given robotic life to every child's dream, building a rescue robot that can take on both humanoid and tank forms as the situation demands. The real life Transformer known as CHIMP (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform) can work like a human when it needs to climb a ladder or operate a valve. But when terrain gets rough, it can drop onto it's four treads, entering a tank-like mode that makes it easier to maneuver and seek out survivors disaster survivors.

We're unabashed fans of DARPA's BigDog robot and its kin, AlphaDog and LittleDog, but that doesn't mean we're always totally comfortable with them. Take for example BigDog's new hand -- which is actually where the mouth would be on a real dog -- that lets it toss pieces of concrete around without a care in the world. Since the robot is designed mainly as an electronic beast of burden designed to help carry the load for soldiers in the field, it makes sense that it's finally got a robotic hand that it can use to grab and manipulate objects. As you can see in the video below, it can also use that hand to chuck cinder blocks a pretty respectable distance.

You figured you could elude Skynet by jumping into the water, right? Robots surely wouldn't come after us in there, because their circuits would get short out if they got wet. Think again! The University of Pennsylvania has deliberately created robotic boats and put them in water with the scheme of one day making bigger floating robots and putting them in bigger bodies of water. Land, sky, sea -- is nowhere safe?

Technology is becoming an increasingly useful and relied-upon tool in combat and other areas of defense, but keeping our gadgets out of the hands of our enemies is also a challenge. Things can get dropped, lost, or stolen, and if that happens DARPA wants to keep our technology from falling into the wrong hands -- by having it self-destruct. This post will self-destruct in five seconds. Just kidding, it won't. At least not until DARPA gives us the technology to do so.

How do you pick the dogs that are chosen for military and law enforcement service? Training is an expensive proposition, so it's in the best interest of everyone to only train those dogs that will do an excellent job. There's nothing worse than a dud dog, even if that's a thing I just made up. There's still nothing worse than that. Thankfully, DARPA is looking into scanning the brains of dogs in order to determine which ones to train, which sounds an awful lot like something out of the Fallout universe.

A few months back, we brought you video of the DARPA-funded, Boston Dynamics-built Legged Squad Support System (LS3) robot, known more familiarly as Alpha Dog. It looks like it's time for another update, as yesterday saw the release of Alpha' Dog's newest trick -- the ability to follow spoken orders issued by a human commander. At this point, Alpha Dog is one magical cricket away from being a real dog, and one more obedient than I've ever had. You can get a load of the robot responding to his master's voice, and then following its human leader like a lovesick metal puppy in the video below.

Researchers at Cornell University working on a grant from DARPA have crafted a quadrocopter robot that can navigate around obstacles in real-time using a new type of 3D vision. This autonomous vision could pave the way for flying rescue robots that don't have to be controlled by humans and can enter caves or broken-down buildings and navigate on their own. Of course, it also paves the way for flying murderbots that can see us wherever we hide and means no place will ever be safe again, but, you know, you take the good with the bad.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked off yesterday with a new video from the military technology agency simulating the kinds of challenges the teams involved in the challenge might come across. It shows the Pet-Proto, a precursor to DARPA's Atlas robot, navigating a series of obstacles like stairs, a gap in the floor, and a jump. The point of the challenge is to develop robots that are suited to handling situations that would otherwise be too dangerous or impossible for a normal human. Robotic Ninja Warrior episodes will just have to wait.

Earlier this week, we shared footage of Boston Dynamics updated Cheetah prototype, but the robotics company isn't stopping there. They're apparently determined to dominate September's robot news cycle with video of the latest improvements to their DARPA funded off-roading automaton LS3 model, better known as Alpha Dog. While Cheetah is built for speed, Alpha Dog is a slower, steadier mechanical marvel, meant to trundle alongside soldiers in the field, and engineered with handling difficult terrain and carrying a heavy load of gear in mind.

The robot hands of the future have generally been envisioned as cold, steely mimics of our own appendages, exceedingly well equipped for squeezing the life out of their flesh and blood creators with four fingers and a thumb, as God intended. The hand evolution made best for us may not be the one that's most fitting for our coming android overlords. More and more roboticists and engineers are looking into inflatable limbs that can grip a variety of objects as the wave of the future. This week, Harvard got in on the act, with researchers introducing a soft, plastic, tentacle-inspired gripper hand that inflates in individually controlled segments for maximum grip customization. The tentacle can gently hold a flower, readily coil around a piece of plastic, and may one day be the thing that crushes your windpipe like a drinking straw.