Japan is facing an aging population and a shortage of nurses. the robotics industry, on the other hand, is booming. Introducing RIBA, which stands for “Robot for Interactive Body Assistance”. RIBA can pick up and carry people weighing as much as 135 pounds.

The cheery-looking machine has long, multi-jointed arms embedded with an array of tactile sensors that help it optimize the lifting and carrying of humans. For safety purposes, RIBA’s entire body is covered in a soft skin molded from an advanced lightweight urethane foam developed by TRI. The soft skin is designed to ensure the comfort of patients while they are being carried. In addition, the arm joints yield slightly under pressure — much like human arms do — further increasing the level of comfort and safety.

Link (with video) -via Digg

A new study shows that elderly people who are overweight or obese have significantly less brain tissue than those of normal weight. The difference was 4% for overweight people and 8% for the obese in a study of 94 people in their 70s. The volunteers were followed for five years, and anyone who showed cognitive impairment was excluded from the final sample.

"The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older," said UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson, senior author of a study published online in Human Brain Mapping.

Much of the lost tissue was in the frontal and temporal lobe regions of the brain, the seat of decision-making and memory, among other things.

It is not clear whether weight gain caused a reduction in brain tissue, or if a smaller brain contributes to weight gain, or there are other factors contributing to both. http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/08/25/as-waistlines-widen-brains-shrink.html -via Lifehacker

(image credit: Flickr user erat)

Mark Wattson of Swindon, England was diagnosed with a ruptured appendix in August. He thought the doctors must have made a mistake, since his appendix had been removed in July! Nevertheless, his appendix was removed in a second surgery.

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Mr Wattson said. "I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the screen for all to see.

"I thought: 'What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place'?"

And that wasn’t the end of his troubles.

The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.

Wattson is considering taking legal action against the hospital. Link -via Arbroath

Visitors to the Bristol Zoo can read all about the species Homo sapiens in this plaque hung by the window of the zoo’s cafe. It says, in part:

After a gestation period of nine months, humans usually live in their parents’ nest for around 16 years. While the parents are out foraging for food, juveniles are looked after in large groups by other adults.

In adolescence, the offspring adopt a more nocturnal lifestyle and engage in ritualized activities of drinking fermented liquids and dancing to rhythmical sounds, which scientists believe help them to find a mate.

Enlarge the picture at the link to read all of it. Link -via Boing Boing

Flying these days is about as pleasant as a root canal, with security hassles, delays, poor service, expensive or nonexistent food, and cramped seats.

But was it always this way? The answer, of course, is no. And so, we decided to take a look back to the glory days of flight - when the stewardesses resembled beauty pageant contestants, when pilots seemed likes heroes, and when flying still seemed to be an adventure - to remind us, of just how things once were.

Enjoy 50 photos of stewardesses from the good old days of air travel. Link -via Gorilla Mask

Officials acting on a tip searched a bus in Tarapoto, Peru for cocaine. They had been alerted that the cocaine was in a crate of turkeys, but they didn’t see any. However, the two live turkeys appeared bloated. Police chief Otero Gonzalez said the turkeys had been surgically implanted.

"Lifting up the feathers of the bird, in the chest area, police detected a handmade seam," he said.

A vet extracted 11 oval-shaped plastic capsules containing 1.9 kilograms (4.2 pounds) of cocaine from one turkey.

A further 17 capsules with 2.9 kilograms (6.4 pounds) were recovered from the other, he said.

The turkeys survived the surgery to remove the cocaine and are recovering. http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Turkeys-Stuffed-With-Cocaine-By-Drugs-Smugglers-In-Peru/Article/200908415368181?lpos=World_News_News_Your_Way_Region_7&lid=NewsYourWay_ARTICLE_15368181_Turkeys_Stuffed_With_Cocaine_By_Drugs_Smugglers_In_Peru -via Arbroath

Pull a petal off this lovely flower and you have a light! If you play “he loves me, he loves me not,” be careful not to get burned. It’s just one of a collection of artful and innovative matchboxes at Crooked Brains. Who knew there were so many odd and unusual ways to package matches? Link

Two couples from Norfolk, England got married in a double wedding dressed as characters from the TV show The Flintstones!

Andrea and Simon Bean, aka Fred and Wilma Flinstone, and Richard and Jill Noble, aka Barney and Betty Rubble, celebrated their double wedding at Weston Park Golf Club on Saturday by taking a quick trip to the next door dinosaur park for some spectacular wedding photographs sure to raise eyebrows on any mantelpiece.

With 165 guests dressed as cavemen and women, two best men dressed as dinosaurs, and a spectacular tiered wedding rock cake, both Wilma and Betty entered the ceremony to the traditional organ sound of Wagner's Bridal March.

However, this was quickly replaced by an organ version of The Flintstones theme tune.

All of the participants had been married before and felt no need for a tradition wedding. In lieu of gifts, the couples received donations for the Children's Liver Disease Foundation. http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=ENOnline&category=News&tBrand=ENOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED23%20Aug%202009%2016%3A07%3A34%3A170 -via Arbroath

(image credit: James Bass)

Some animals have been bred in space, but not mammals. Japanese researchers are looking into the possibility, and doing experiments with mice on earth that mimic lower gravity space conditions.

To test these effects, the researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction.

Fertilization took place normally, suggesting that microgravity hadn’t harmed the sperm. But as the embryos continued to develop inside the clinostat, many developed problems. Their cells had trouble dividing and maturing.

There were some baby mice produced after the embryos were implanted, but not many survived compared to a control group. Link -via Digg

David Austin made a chainmail chessboard in 2001, and a few years later completed the chess pieces to go with it, also out of chainmail. The result is a game fit for a medieval king! Link -via Unique Daily

You may think you have a difficult, greedy, egotistical boss, but you haven’t met anyone like the boss who locked his employees inside a factory, or the boss who paid in script only redeemable at his stores, or the one who made his employees analyze animal poop. Then there was Bryant and May who decided to save money on the material they made matches from.

They had a better idea. They had been making their matches with the extremely flammable but otherwise safe red phosphorous. But there was this other kind, white phosphorous, that was way cheaper. And there was absolutely no downside.

Oh, except it would literally eat your face off when you handled it.

The description of what happened to the employees may make you queasy. Read about all six horrific bosses at Cracked. Link

Now you can make your own keyboard cat that plays his own little papercraft keyboard when you crank the handle! TubbyPaws has a pattern and a cute video tutorial. Link -via Metafilter

Have you ever wondered where comic books writers get their ideas for super heroes? In this t-shirt by Chop Shop, they are named after Photoshop effects! The results are at least as believable as anything DC or Marvel has. Link -via Laughing Squid

The percentage of new pharmaceutical products that fail their effectiveness trials is growing. The culprit is the placebo effect, which appears to be stronger than in years past. If a drug cannot provide relief significantly better than a sugar pill, it won’t go on the market.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.

Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect works, and the various reasons newer drugs don’t compete as well with the mind’s ability to affect our bodies. Link -via Boing Boing

Previously at Neatorama: Prozac: No Better Than Placebo?

Kaitlin at Whisk Kid made this cake as a treat for the eye as well as the palate! The recipe is posted with the warning that you will need more frosting than you think. Link -via Digg