feed on feeds - 2012/09/24 - items 0 to 15

Västafrikanska soldater kommer att förstärka Malis styrkor i försöken att återta kontrollen av den islamistockuperade norra delen av landet.

cylonlover writes "Toyota has unveiled a new assistant robot designed to help the disabled live more independently. Called the Human Support Robot (HSR), it represents the latest initiative in Toyota's Partner Robot program and is intended to help out around the home by fetching things, opening curtains, and picking up objects that have fallen to the floor. The HSR can be controlled using a simple graphical user interface via tablet PC. It can also wear a tablet atop its head, which would allow caregivers and family members to communicate with the robot's owner over Skype or other services. But unlike recent telepresence robots including the recently announced iRobot RP-VITA, the HSR has an arm and gripper for doing the simple tasks we often take for granted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UN health agency issues a global alert over a new virus similar to the one that claimed 800 lives in 2003.

SvD:s Jan Blomgren: ”Hela valet var en fars”.

quax writes "In the wake of the Fukushima disaster the nuclear industry again faces massive opposition. Germany even decided to abandon nuclear energy altogether and the future of the industry is under a cloud of uncertainty in Japan. But one thing seems to be here to stay for a very, very long time: The radioactive waste that has half-lives measured in thousands of years. But there is a technology under development in Belgium that could change all this: A sub-critical reactor design, driven by a particle accelerator that can transmute the nuclear waste into something that goes away within about two hundred years. Could this lead to a revival of the nuclear industry and the reprocessing of spend reactor fuel?"