La Vida Robot
How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.

The winter rain makes a mess of West Phoenix. It turns dirt yards into mud and forms reefs of garbage in the streets. Junk food wrappers, diapers, and Spanish-language porn are swept into the gutters. On West Roosevelt Avenue, security guards, two squad cars, and a handful of cops watch teenagers file into the local high school. A sign reads: Carl Hayden Community High School: The Pride’s Inside.

There certainly isn’t a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late ’50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal’s office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

The school PA system crackles, and an upbeat female voice fills the bustling linoleum-lined hallways. “Anger management class will begin in five minutes,” says the voice from the administration building. “All referrals must report immediately.”

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It’s a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

Guardian Unlimited: Tsunami Death Toll Climbs to 52,000
By ANDI DJATMIKO
Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) – Mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia’s devastating tsunamis. Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to more than 52,000.

Indonesia’s Health Ministry said in a statement that more than 27,000 people were confirmed killed in parts of Sumatra island, the territory closest to the epicenter of Sunday’s earthquake, which sent a giant tsunami rolling across the Indian Ocean.

But the ministry said it had not yet counted deaths along the inundated and shattered towns of Sumatra’s western coast, which soldiers and rescue workers were unable so far to reach – including the district of Meulaboh, where earlier the head of another agency estimated that 10,000 people were killed.

When those regions are included in the ministry count, the death toll could rise dramatically yet again.

TV footage from overflights of Meulaboh and other parts of the west coast showed thousands of homes underwater. Refugees fleeing the coast described surviving for days on little more than coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra’s northern tip, which itself was largely flattened by the quake.

“The sea was full of bodies,” said Sukardi Kasdi, who reached the capital from his town of Surang.