Customer Service Humanoid Droid on Duty in Tokyo Japan Almost Human

""The latest robot sensation in Japan is so lifelike that when she was on the floor of a Tokyo department store recently, she was confused for a human being. The new humanoid's name is Aiko Chihira, and she was working in customer service, clad in a traditional silk kimono.

"She's 165 centimeters [5 feet 5 inches] tall ... and she's supposed to be 32 years old," Hitoshi Tokuda says. He's Toshiba Corp.'s head of new business development, who led the making of Chihira with a team of programmers.

"Her movement is done by 30-times-per-second data [transfers]," he says, and she's powered by 43 motors. So Chihira's movements — like bowing or blinking — look subtle and her silicone body looks more wax figure than R2-D2.

Even in Japan, where new releases of robots are common, she was a surprise for customers like Masayuki Yamamoto.

"It's stunning, seriously I never expected this would be real," Yamamoto says. "I thought, why on earth are all these people taking a picture of a receptionist? I looked at her carefully and I realized it was a robot."

When NPR visited Chihira, she fooled more than a few folks into thinking she's real.

That trick of getting a robot to look human, without winding up in the uncanny valley that scares children, is a difficult balance for designers. Toshiba's Tokuda says it was his team's biggest challenge.

"Eighty percent humanlike is very scary. So it has to be 90 percent or close, or very close to perfect," Tokuda says.""

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/05/14/403498509/shes-almost-real-the-new-humanoid-on-customer-service-duty-in-tokyo

Multitudes of Deep Sea Melon-head Dolphin Families Beach Themselves Along the Waters of Hokota Japan

""We see one or two whales washing ashore a year, but this may be the first time to find over 100 of them on a beach," a coastguard official told AFP.

The pod was stretched out along a roughly six-mile-long stretch of beach in Hokota, Ibaraki, where they had been found by locals early Friday morning.

"They are alive. I feel sorry for them," a man told public broadcaster NHK, as others were seen ferrying buckets of seawater to the stranded animals and pouring it over them.

Several animals could be seen writhing in a futile effort to move themselves on the sand, although as the morning progressed they were clearly becoming weaker

Melon-headed whales, also known as electra dolphins, are relatively common in Japanese waters and can grow to be six- to nine-feet long.

In 2011, about 50 melon-headed whales beached themselves in a similar area.

Despite international opprobrium, Japan hunts minke and pilot whales off its own coast, and has for many years also pursued the mammals in the Antarctic Ocean using a scientific exemption to the international moratorium on whaling.

It has never made any secret of the fact that meat from the animals is also consumed.

However, a UN court ruled last year that its hunt was a commercial activity masquerading as research, and ordered it be halted.

Tokyo, which insists whaling is a tradition and labels environmental campaigners as "cultural imperialists", has vowed to restart a redesigned southern ocean whaling programme, possibly later this year.""

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11526850/Race-to-save-more-than-130-beached-dolphins-in-Japan.html