The robot maker just lost its second co-founder in as many months. On Wednesday, Helen Greiner stepped down from her post as chairman of iRobot, leaving only CEO Colin Angle as the remaining co-founder of the company. Coming as it does just a month after the resignation of Rodney Brooks, iRobot’s co-founder and CTO, Greiner’s departure is a bit of a surprise. And the company, which just reported a better-than-expected profit in its third quarter, offered little explanation for it. “She’ll be a passionate advocate of the industry,” said iRobot spokesperson Nancy Dussault-Smith. “Helen’s in a good place. She’s always been someone who’s been entrepreneurial. She’s a robot person through and through, and she’s going to stay in the robot business.”

Robot: Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers; developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

Bill Gates: Good; we’ve got the Ballmer-bot pretty excited here. It’s an amazing-looking robot. It’s just balancing itself, and fantastic.

Patrick Deegan: Yeah, what you see here is the latest in robotics technology. The Ballmer-bot features a dynamically stable mobile base, a rotating torso and two dexterous arms. This makes it so that it’s even able to throw eggs.

Scientists at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health have nearly managed to reproduce (no pun intended) the minute biological engine that powers a sperm’s flagellum. That engine runs on a high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which sperm create via a metabolic process known as glycolysis.

Now, glycolysis requires 10 enzymes attached in the proper sequence to occur in the body. What the Cornell scientists hope to do is make it occur on a tiny gold chip covered with nickel ions. So far, they have attached three of the 10 enzymes to do that. If they’re able to attach the remaining seven, that little gold chip should generate enough ATP to power a nanodevice. Should that occur, their achievement could usher in a new era of smart in-body medical devices that use blood glucose as fuel.

Said Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti, a nanotechnology researcher at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, Calif., “Having some sort of way of being able to power nanodevices is the No. 1 bottleneck in constructing really clever devices.”

In June, the U.S. Army sent the the first armed ground robots into action in Iraq. Dubbed “special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system” (SWORDS), the robots are armed with M249 machine guns–though they haven’t yet had cause to use them. The ‘bots “haven’t fired their weapons yet,” Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, told Wired. “But that’ll be happening soon.”

So much for Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”