Antarctica is one of the harshest places on Earth to work. But it's also an important site for scientific study, especially given rising worries about global warming. So any tool that helps keep the frostbite away from flesh-and-blood researchers is bound to be a good thing.
Enter the Cool Robot. This big blue box is a solar-powered, self-propelled machine designed to act as an observation post on the polar landscape. It's a project of a group at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. "The Cool Robot concept was a robot that could deploy instrument networks in a vehicle that was very light," Laura Ray, a professor at Dartmouth and a leader of the project, said this week at the Arctic Science Summit Week in Hanover, according to the Reuters news agency.