All the fun of the desert and the rainforest from the (relative) comfort of home? Sign us up. That’s the promise offered by the admittedly awesomely named Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (that’s LASR, for you abbreviators out there), first announced last month. The robotics lab, housed in a $17.7 million building at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, offers up around 50,000 square feet, a portion of which is aimed at reproducing some of the Earth’s more extreme ecosystems to test out naval robotics. The facility is home to firefighting robots, swimming ‘bots and hydrogen fuel cell-powered unmanned aircrafts, to name but a few. (via US Navy shows off its new LASR autonomous robot testing facility — Engadget)