Honda Motor Co. has been getting good press the week with a demonstration of its P-2 walking robot (TCC 7.02, 09Jan97). The 462-pound autonomous android can climb stairs or find a work site, push a cart to it, and tighten a loose bolt. No commercial release is planned. [AP. SJM, 29Jul97, 1C.]

"The Nine Planets" site at is "one of those wonderful sites that redeem the value of the Web," according to Doug Fraser. He also likes the NASA Pathfinder sites and . [, 09Jul97.]

InScight is a daily science news publication, from SCIENCE magazine and Academic Press. . [12Nov96.]

Plasma-wave chips transmit signals via electric field waves rather than electron packets. This could permit gigahertz microprocessors, or sensors able to respond to the molecular vibrations of specific substances. [BW, 07Jul97.]

BBN Systems and Technologies has developed a "QuietChip" anti-noise system for automobiles. "Your first reaction is that the car in the next lane suddenly got louder." It will be marketed to car makers next year. . [Discover, Jul97. NewtNews.]

Numonics Corp. has developed an Interactive FlipChart electronic pen that captures drawings and text made on ordinary easel pads. The bitmap file can be edited and distributed via email, paper, or fax. [CIO, Jul97. NewtNews, 15Jul97. Bill Park.]

Malaysia is using the "FaceIt" face-recognition software developed by Visionics (NJ). When airline passengers buy tickets, their local facial features are encoded in a "smart card" boarding pass. At boarding time, a second scan is matched to the first. [TechWire, 26Jun97. NewtNews.] (Visionics' CEO is also head of the Rockefeller U. Computational Neuroscience Lab.)

Jack Berlin of Pegasus Imaging Corp. reports that most modern compression methods now beat fractal compression. Well done JPEG implementations are particularly good. Wavelet techniques are showing a bit of promise, with interesting commercial possibilities coming out of USouth Carolina (Summus) and Yale (FMA&H, plus the FBI fingerprint wavelets). Yale and Pegasus offer beta wavelet compressors for commercial trials, with a-coding and speed tricks built in; see . See for wavelet resources. Other good pointers are the SPIDT page, , and the Compression Pointers page at . [, comp.compression, 26Jun97.]

For LaTeX fans: Scientific Word Ltd. has a new website for their Scientific Word product, a WYSIWYG LaTeX for MS Windows and Power Mac; Scientific WorkPlace, a WYSIWYG Maple with link to Mathematica; and Scientific Notebook, a LaTeX-based Web browser. . [Christopher Mabb , sci.math.symbolic, 18Jul97.]

Remember when solving integrals was AI research? Mathematica from Wolfram Research, Inc. (Champaign, IL) solves integrals beyond normal human capability. You can too, at their Integrator website, . Visitors have used Mathematica's networked capabilities to solve hundreds of thousands of integrals. [Heather Albright , comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica, 17Jul97.]

Answers to other math questions can be had from Dr. Math, . [26Aug96.]

Hypatia Electronic Library is a directory of research workers in computer science and pure mathematics -- e.g., constraint satisfaction -- and a library of their papers (with bibtex bibliographic details). . [Ian Gent , csp-list, 09Jun97. David Joslin.]