Terminator’s hand? It’s back, in the form of a German robot.

Is German for “I’ll be back!”

Researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR),  have built a scary looking anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects, such as getting hit with a baseball bat—a 66 G impact.

Robustness, or Robustheit was the key word for the German researchers when designing this robot hand, which IEEE Spectrum’s Editor Erico Guizzo believes may be the toughest robot hand yet.

The robot hand is the same shape and size as a human hand with 5 individually moving fingers that can exert a force of up to 30 newtons at the fingertips, and 38 tendons, which are each connected to an individual motor on the robot’s forearm. The motors control tension of the tendons in, allowing the hand to absorb violent shocks.

Watch it all the way to the end of the video to see the robot’s hand withstand the whack of a hammer.

At first I was a bit worried about what hand holding in the future would be like, but Guizzo points out that the robot hand can detect whether an object is soft and must be handled more gently by measuring the force and keeping track of the elongation through its spring mechanisms.

Markus Grebenstein, the hand’s lead designer, estimates the cost of the hardware for one hand is between 70,000 and 100,000 euros. Next, they will build a complete two-arm torso called the DLR Hand Arm System.

Samsung TV Apps Surpass 2 Million Downloads

Samsung has announced that its Samsung Apps platform, the world’s first app store specifically for televisions, has surpassed two million app downloads globally, reaching the milestone in under a year since it launched.

Demonstrating the demand for applications on Samsung’s Smart TV’s, the number of apps downloaded doubled since November, offering 380 applications (259 of which are free) to its customers in over 120 countries around the world.

Whilst it took 268 days for the store to reach one million downloads, it only took 53 days to reach two million, with consumers downloading an average of 100,000 applications every five days.

Samsung is well known for supporting its developer community, the company regularly schedules events and meetings for Samsung Apps developers so that they can ask questions and understand the tools made available by Samsung.

LG Optimus 3D Spotted In The Wild

As Mobile World Congress draws nearer, handsets are starting to make appearances across the internet, with LG’s much anticipated Optimus 3D leaking for the first time today.

Although the image doesn’t show if the LG Optimus 3D has a 3D screen, it does finally give us an idea of the device that will take us “into a new dimension”. Recently, Dutch mobile retailer The Phone House, which is the Dutch arm of The Carphone Warehouse, put live a teaser page for the device but uploaded it with what looked to be a picture of the LG Optimus One.

Phandroid was the gracious recipient of the leaked image, highlighting that its source believes the screen in excess of 4-inches and that the smartphone might be powered by dual-core processor with mutli-channel RAM, making it as powerful as the new Optimus 2X.

It will also feature a front-facing camera. Then again, what smartphone launching in the near future won’t have one?