The room looks like a set for one of those grade-B horror movies Ed Wood loved to make. In one corner, a skeleton draped in wires spasmodically jerks its arm up and down-meet "Mr. Bony." In another corner, strange, gelatinous creatures undulate like jellyfish inside tanks. More of the slippery blobs wiggle inside Tupperware containers that overrun the cabinets. "On campus, they call this the spooky lab,'" notes Mohsen Shahinpoor, director of the University of New Mexico's Intelligent Materials Laboratory. "And to tell you the truth, it can get a little scary around here."

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