Here's a few interesting articles for your holiday-time perusal:

For $225k, you can swing by a department store in Japan and get a humanoid robot that looks like you!

Robot advances from around the world are featured in the EU Infrastructure article.

Wired's Gadget Lab shows off the hard-drive sculptures by Miguel Rivera, including a biped robot which uses 14 defunct laptop drives.

Unmanned flying vehicles are looking for a boost from research into hummingbird flight at University at Buffalo.

Advances in brain-machine interfacing is outlined in a recent article at GIGIOM.

A posting over on DIGG linked to this picture of R2 having lunch.

And we finish off with this Christmas video by rhyspross and the robot powers that be.

Cheers to all!