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A 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Rebel placed eighth at an international engineering competition this past weekend. Did we mention that Rebel doesn’t have a brain?

51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ made a strong showing at the world’s most advanced robotics competition over the weekend.

From the very beginning of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, it was obvious that driving was going to be a problem for the robot contestants. The very first robots to take the field this past Friday at the Fairplex in Pomona, California showed up without their modified Polaris utility vehicles. These machines were hoofing it, using their own legs to gradually make their way down a dirt strip meant to simulate part of a disaster zone too perilous for humans. It turned out to be pretty perilous for robots, too. By not even getting into the cars, these teams were already conceding defeat in the two-day Pentagon-funded competition.

After months of preparation, the fate of 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s bid to win a prestigious robotics competition is now in the hands, or should we say metal clampers, of one robot.

In the dark recesses of a tiny cave two hours northwest of Las Vegas, about 100 fish the size of your thumb live a very tough life.

In early 2014, a small team of international programmers created Popcorn Time, an app that enables free online streaming of movies and television shows using BitTorrent file-sharing protocols. Just over a year later, the app's popularity has already reached Netflix-like levels, largely due to its slick interface and higher-quality streams than those on many piracy sites.

Here’s a fish story for you: Five years ago, researchers at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ launched what they expected to be a simple, one-week study of the endangered Devil’s Hole pupfish. What they netted instead was a metabolic mystery that seems to defy the rules of biology.

Robots build cars, vacuum floors and complete sophisticated, minimally invasive medical procedures. But there’s still one thing they can’t do, a scientific head-scratcher that continues to distinguish machines from human beings: While a robot might outsmart a single human, it cannot defeat two.