Ali Kuru

RIKEN, a natural sciences research institute in Japan, and Tokai Rubber Industries designed a robot which can pick a person off the floor to his/her wheelchair, or vice versa. This is useful in Japan, where people often sleep on futon floor bedding or relax on floor tatami mats. “Riba II” named robot is able to lift off a person weighing as much as 176 pounds (approx. 80 kg for us, the SI system users).

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.
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Moore’s Law assumes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years, which means chip makers have to squeeze an increasing number of transistors onto every chip. According to Wired Gadgets, IBM is experimenting DNA Origami to create smaller chips;

Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.

“The idea is to combine leading edge lithography that can offer feature size of 25 nanometers with some chemical magic to access much smaller dimensions,” says Robert Allen, senior manager of chemistry and materials at IBM Almaden Research. “This allows us to place nano objects with 6-nanometer resolution. You don’t have a hope of doing that with lithography today.”

Giving DNA to our computers? I guess we can start counting down for Skynet after that :)

Just found an interesting video of DNA transcription process, created with LEGO animation :)

The bright orange subunits are the mRNA nucleotides. In transcription, the single stranded messenger RNA (a copy of the DNA gene) is produced by the base paring rule. The mRNA then exits the nucleus through a pore in the nuclear membrane.

[MIT TechTV via BoingBoing Gadgets]