If you think "Pleo" is just a robotic pet then inventor Caleb Chung will tell you that he thinks Pleo is a designer life-form: on the outside, everything about the one-week-old Camarasaurus is very unrobotic. The movements are fluid and its actions are spontaneous and unprogrammed. The skin is smooth, seamless and stretchy. Inside, it's another story: the 3.3-pound Pleo is very robotic indeed. It has 38 sensors to detect light, motion, touch and sound. They feed information about Pleo's environment to one of eight processors that can handle a collective 60 million calculations per second, that's quite a lot! A complex computer program determines what the dino does next—howl over the edge of a table, sneeze, crane its neck around 180 degrees to see who's scratching its back, or any of thousands of other possibilities. The software is upgradable as the manufacturer Ugobe (California, USA) develops more sophisticated personality coding, either via its SD-card slot or from the Web through its USB port.