Fleming had no wish to go there and see Andre slowly dying as the machine sucked the last use out of her.

Team Robot's machine sucked in balls one at a time, transported them up a ramp with a belt pulley and dropped them into a basket.

Buzzing softly, the machine was sucking in air which carried through the hose and out the wide sweeper, which remained glued to the ceiling cracks because of the sucking force of the air that left it!

A last switch was thrown and the lights dimmed as the machine sucked in all the available power.

But for that brief millisecond the TII field had been turned off and the machine had sucked a copy of Slakey's memory, his intelligence, his every thought into its electronic recesses.

After a few beeps, the machine sprang to life, sucked one of the pages into the feeder, and started to turn it around, spitting it out, bit by tiny bit.

Towering machines suck cotton from bales and spin it into yarn, dyeing the fibers, then weaving them into fabric that flows onto wide 600-pound rolls.

Very soon apparently, giant machines will suck the effluent gases from steel making into huge chambers; then extract the carbon monoxide from this mix and turn this gas into alcohol; and then into sustainable aviation biofuel.

"The machines suck people into the screen," says Professor William Thompson, a gambling expert at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The trash and just about anything else unsecured on the unoccupied platformvending machines, discarded newspapers, a dead rat, everything-was sucked down onto the tracks as if pulled into the voracious heart of a black hole.