The way we see it, humans have just two deeply rooted fears. Both are completely justified. Robots and snakes. Well,now Carnegie Mellon has combined both effectively and taught its robotic snake how to climb trees. “Uncle Sam” is a modular snake robot and the latest in a line of snakes from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab. Uncle Sam can roll, wiggle and side-wind with the best of them.

Now that it can wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, it can therefore climb trees. Maybe even pluck an apple and offer it up to an Eve-bot. We were scared of robot snakes before, but now it might truly be time to whimper and hide somewhere and wait out the coming robotpocalypse.

First it was Google’s playable Pac Man logo. Now YouTube has their own game to help you kill some time while you should be working, with their hidden game of Snake. Just go to a video in the gaming category, click inside the video, and hold the left arrow key.

That’s when a trail of white dots will appear. You steer your snake through a single blinking white dot that you need to steer your snake across.

Like the Terminator, robot news just doesn’t stop. As usual, we have you covered over at Botropolis. Everything robot, all the time. And yes, the deeper we delve into the seedy underworld of robotics and robots in our culture, the more fearful fascinated we become. It’s clear that robots are our ultimate destruction friends and ultimate salvation. Seriously, I have nightmares every night. I have the shakes. I welcome them with open arms and embrace their master plan. Below are some of the things we covered this week.

*edited by the Robot Editorial Guild. Streamlining your words since 2009. Streamlining your thoughts soon after.

This fire fighting bot spits venom to put out fires. And by venom I mean harmless water. Anna Konda has been fitted with what amounts to a super soaker.

The slithering bot is 3 meters long, weighs in at 75 kilos, and has 20 joints, each with 33 degrees of movement. It shoots water sure, but it’s also powered by H2O. In each joint section there are hydraulic valves and cylinders that can handle 1450 psi of water pressure. Anna Konda is designed to be a fire fighting snake and high water pressure has the added advantage of making it stronger while keeping it’s components cool which is a bonus when fighting fires. In the future a bot like this will strangle you dead, but for now he’s looking to take Smokey The Bear’s job, by protecting us from fire while creeping us out. Video below.

Not sure what to do with your old keyboards? Why not make an awesome, but completely harmless viper out of them. Harmless to everything but computer mice at any rate. Awesome. Totally awesome I say. The only thing better would be to use black keys and create an even larger King Cobra. Man, I would like to see one of those kids get bit. Is that wrong?