The robot invasion is nigh. The Ministry of Information and Communication in South Korea has announced that robotic helpers will arrive in 1000 homes and 40 nursery schools in and around Seoul this September. The bots will help tidy up, care for pets, detect intruders and read to their owners. They will be able to navigate autonomously, but will rely on remote control for some other tasks.
The world’s first “petaflop” computer has been installed at the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama, Japan. MDGrape-3 consists of 201 units each equipped with 24 specialised chips. It is capable of an unprecedented thousand trillion calculations per second but, unlike most supercomputers, is designed to perform just one specific task:…
