Honda's human-shaped robot can now run faster, balance itself on uneven surfaces, hop on one foot and pour a drink. Some of its technology may even be used to help out with clean-up operations at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant.

Honda's demonstration of the revamped "Asimo" on Tuesday at its Tokyo suburban research facility was not only to prove that the bubble-headed childlike machine was more limber and a bit smarter.

It was a way to try to answer some critics that Asimo, first shown in 2000, had been of little practical use so far, proving to be nothing more than a glorified toy and cute showcase for the Honda Motor Co. brand.

Honda President Takanobu Ito told reporters some of Asimo's technology was used to develop a robotic arm in just six months with the intention of helping with the nuclear crisis in northeastern Japan.

The mechanical arm can open and close valves at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which went into meltdown after the March tsunami, according to Honda. The automaker is working with the utility behind the problem plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., to try to meet demands to bring the plant under control.

Ito acknowledged that the first idea was to send in Asimo to help out, but that was not possible because the robot cannot maneuver in rubble, and its delicate computer parts would malfunction in radiation.

On a trio of tiny islands off Ireland's western coast, there is a mystery afoot. Something has picked up massive boulders and set them down inland, on a flat, wind-lashed landscape encircled by craggy cliffs that rise from the Atlantic Ocean.

Strewn along the haunting, rugged coastlines of the Aran Islands, the rocks were ripped from the faces of the surrounding cliffs below. Some originate from beneath the ocean's surface. The largest of these boulders weigh about 78 tons, and lie some 40 feet (12 meters) above the reach of the sea. Smaller boulders, weighing about 3 or 4 tons each, lie more than 820 feet (250 m) inland.

"The local people say that these rocks are moving," said geologist Ronadh Cox, a professor of geosciences and chairwoman of the maritime studies program at Williams College in Massachusetts.

So what unseen hand is capable of tossing such heavy boulders so far inland?

Cox said that she and some of her students have uncovered the answer, thanks to some man-made rock walls, some high-tech tools, a species of tiny clam, and maps made more than a century ago. The team presented work at the recent Geological Society of America annual meeting held in Minneapolis, and have submitted the research for publication.

Abolition would see 'official' time unmoored from the Sun.

"The times," sang Bob Dylan, "they are a-changin'." His words could become literal truth in January, when the World Radiocommunication Conference of the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland, will vote on whether to redefine Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and pull our clock time out of synchronization with the Sun's location in the sky.

At issue is whether to abolish the 'leap second' - the extra second added every year or so to keep UTC in step with Earth's slightly unpredictable orbit. UTC - the reference against which international time zones are set - is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks, with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.

But "leap seconds are a nuisance", says Elisa Felicitas Arias, the director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France. They cannot be preprogrammed into software because they are typically announced only six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Frankfurt, Germany. If the seconds get implemented inconsistently in different systems, clocks can briefly go out of synch, potentially leading to glitches that can stall computers and leave international financial markets vulnerable to attack.

Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) Institute for Cognitive Systems are in the process of creating a new robot that features a realistic human face and can reproduce basic dialog, according to a press release sent out by the university on Monday.

According to that media advisory, the so-called "Mask-Bot" features a number of innovations. Those include the projection of a vast array of realistic 3D faces that can be viewed from any number of angles, rather than the "cartoon-like style" utilized by other development teams.

Those faces are displayed on a transparent plastic mask, and can be changed at any time through the use of a projector that is positioned behind the mask itself, the TUM researchers said.

Furthermore, according to Popsci reporter Rebecca Boyle, Mask-Bot utilizes a "talking head animation engine" that allows it to "filter face emotions according to the emotional feel of spoken words, so the faces accurately reflect the speakers' expressions."

A research team has accomplished the rejuvenation of cells from elderly donors, which could prove to be beneficial for regenerative medicine

A research team from the Functional Genomics Institute has successfully reprogrammed cells from elderly donors in vitro to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to rejuvenated human embryonic stem cells (hESC).

Jean-Marc Lemaitre, study leader and Inserm researcher at the Functional Genomics Institute (Inserm, CNRS, and Université de Montpellier 1 and 2), and Inserm's AVENIR Genomic plasticity and aging team, have accomplished the rejuvenation of cells from elderly donors, which could prove to be beneficial for regenerative medicine.

Since 2007, research teams have been able to reprogram human adult cells into iPSCs, which have similar traits as hESCs. HESCs are the desired result because they are undifferentiated cells that can form various types of differentiated adult cells in the body. Using embryonic stem cells is out of the question due to ethical problems with using stem cells from a human embryo, so researchers have been using different avenues to achieve the same results.

Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light -- are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles and delivering them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

The NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) has awarded Principal Investigator Paul Stysley and team members Demetrios Poulios and Barry Coyle at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., $100,000 to study three experimental methods for corralling particles and transporting them via laser light to an instrument -- akin to a vacuum using suction to collect and transport dirt to a canister or bag. Once delivered, an instrument would then characterize their composition.

"Though a mainstay in science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, laser-based trapping isn't fanciful or beyond current technological know-how," Stysley said. The team has identified three different approaches for transporting particles, as well as single molecules, viruses, ribonucleic acid, and fully functioning cells, using the power of light.

A huge asteroid's close approach to Earth tomorrow (Nov. 8) reinforces that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery, and we can't just sit around waiting to get hit again, experts say.

Asteroid 2005 YU55, which is the size of an aircraft carrier, will zip within the moon's orbit tomorrow, but it poses no danger of hitting us for the foreseeable future. Eventually, however, one of its big space rock cousins will barrel straight toward Earth, as asteroids have done millions of times throughout our planet's history.

If we want to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, which were wiped out by an asteroid strike 65 million years ago, we're going to have to deflect a killer space rock someday, researchers say. Fortunately, we know how to do it.

"We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts," said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman of the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to predicting and preventing catastrophic asteroid strikes. "We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival."

In fact, we have several different techniques at our disposal to nudge killer asteroids away from Earth. Here's a brief rundown of the possible arrows in our planetary defense quiver.

Boeing Co and All Nippon Airways are investigating a landing gear problem on the 787 Dreamliner, the first technical glitch reported since the new jetliner entered service less than two weeks ago, the airline said on Monday.

Pilots on the first of two aircraft delivered so far to ANA were forced on Sunday to deploy the landing gear using a manual backup system, after an indicator lamp suggested the wheels were not properly down.

They landed at Okayama on the second attempt following the incident, the airline said.

"We are not yet sure what the problem was, but we are investigating," an airline spokesman said, adding that Boeing was also involved in the investigation.

Today we are going to look at the Summary of Conclusions about Fireballs and Meteorites that Victor Clube attached to his cover letter to the Chief, Physics and BMD Coordinator of the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development back in 1996, 5 years before September 11, 2001; that, and a few other things.

I often get accused of "fear mongering" because I keep bringing this subject up again and again. I even think that it is fascinating that the big breakthrough in my experiment in Superluminal Communication came on the day that the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy began striking Jupiter - even at the very moment of the first impact - and that this communication with "myself in the future" has focused so much attention on the subject of swarms of comets and comet fragments that repeatedly barrel through the solar system, wreaking havoc and bringing death and destruction to earth. As a result of the research prompted by this communication, I wrote an entire 800 page book that is woven around the issue of cometary explosion type catastrophes that obviously have occurred repeatedly throughout history: The Secret History of The World.

In the early days of publishing the results of this experiment, I was nonplussed by the many attacks I came under from all quarters. I was accused of "channeling aliens" (not true); of wanting to "start a cult" (what is cultic about doing research into scientific subjects and exposing religion for the fraud it is?) and so on. That sort of thing really hurt and puzzled me at first, but I have now seen it for the blessing it was: it has helped me to learn about the kinds of people who are in charge of our world, the kind of people who want to keep secrets so that they can hang onto power: the kind of people who create such things as "The War on Terror" to conceal from the masses of humanity the future that may very well bring our civilization to an end; the kind of people who know that survival of cometary bombardment is possible and who want to be the only ones who do survive, and to hell with everyone else.

Star study suggests life-friendly conditions could be regional

Could yet another universal constant, the value assigned to the electromagnetic force, be less constant than we thought? And could variability of the constant help explain life in the universe?

That's the tantalizing hypothesis offered by Australian astronomers, who believe that the value alpha, referring to the strength of the electromagnetic force (and measured at 1/137.03599976), may not be constant everywhere.