Ten billion Euros! That’s 12.9 billion dollars! It’s also how much the European Space Agency and Innovation Minister Lord Drayson have decided to spend on a new space budget. Some of the money is going toward things like funding Galileo, the European GPS service, and a feasibility study for a returnable spacecraft. But the most intriguing plan to emerge from the Agency’s two day conference is the agreement to build a research center at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
One of the center’s main objectives will be to develop space robots. ExoMars is such a bot–it will be designed to search for life on mars. Space robots and discovering aliens all in the same project? Simply out of this world.

[BBC] VIA [The Register]

This “1-DOF Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) compatible needle driver robot for radiofrequency ablation (RFA),” as it’s technically billed, could be an important breakthrough for breast-cancer treatment. This robot from researchers at the University of Maryland can perform a breast biopsy, and then if cancer cells are detected, a robotic probe will go in and destroy them. The technology is in the prototype phase right now and will need to go through the necessary FDA/clinical trials steps before coming to a hospital near you, but if found to be safe, its implementation would be beneficial.
The robotic probe is special because it is made from steel and titanium, so it can operate inside the strong magnetic field generated by an MRI machine. This allows doctors to remotely operate the bot while still being able to view what’s going on on the inside. Rao Gullapalli, a radiologist professor from University of Baltimore who is involved with the project said, “With the robot, the three months between mammogram and treatment can be reduced to a hospital visit and the cancer can be stopped before it spreads.”

[ZDNet]