first you take a heart, then you tear it apart

[intertribal]

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

Leave it to Fox News to present this stuff.  According to EATR's web site, the "Phase III" commercialization phase of EATR's development will involve leasing EATR out to the national parks to conduct "natural resource management," out to Texas to conduct "border control," and out to your local town to conduct "traffic control."  

Hope had brought us this far
Far enough to cut
Our heart to pieces

[and in case you wonder why I'm listening to Di6, it's because of an excellent article in Harper's reviewing Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War, "Kinds of Killing" - so I'm in kind of a war-machine mood]

ETA: Robotic Technology Inc. fervently denies that EATR will be able to eat anything "scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips."  Why?  "Desecration of the dead is a war crime ... and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI."  

Yeah.  RIGHT.