For a company most famous for its wheeled products, Honda certainly seems quite focused on things to help people get about on their own two feet, introducing another new prototype machine with just that in mind.

ENGADGET: Honda introduces new walking assist machine, doubles as bionic wedgie maker

Scherer had an interest in biology, and he called Caltech biology professor David Baltimore, a 1975 Nobel laureate in medicine, to see if Baltimore's lab could help with the experiments on the prototype machine Maltezos and his lab mates had devised.

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Its prototype Turing machine uses a set of electroactive polymer muscles to push memory elements into place and squeeze piezoresistive switches, performing virtually any calculation through flexing.

ENGADGET: Turing machine built from artificial muscles may lead to smart prosthetics

But hers is an uneven trident: she has lots of EU development money, but her diplomatic machine is still a prototype and she has only a rudimentary military-planning outfit.

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One of them, Rear Admiral Simon Lister, is in charge of this complex programme, and as he took me round the cramped corridors, past the nuclear reactor and down into the sweaty machine rooms, he acknowledged this was a prototype and there was always going to be some "teething" issues.

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