The U.S. space shuttle Discovery lifted off from its Florida launch pad on Saturday on a mission to deliver a bus-sized Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station.
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Enormous numbers of people are being replaced by (or perhaps converted into) robots, reports suggest, and the trend is set to continue.
Indeed, the issue has become so salient in Japan that a specialist thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation (MIMF?), has been set up to monitor the gradual infiltration of society by mechanoid impostors.
Reuters reports […]

While you’re at it check out Andrew Brooks’ thesis defense “Coordinating Human-Robot Communication.”
While robots are a long way from matching human emotional complexity, Japan is perhaps the closest to a future — once the stuff of science fiction — where humans and intelligent robots routinely live side by side and interact socially.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2008-03-01-robots_N.htm

‘Space fireworks’ were successfully released by researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Sunday. The three one-and-a-half minute bursts were visible from most of western Japan including Tokyo.
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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Osaka University have developed a system that converts sunlight into laser-light. The team is working on a space-based weapon solar power system which can collect sunlight in space, convert it into laser light, and then beam that light to Earth. Presumably to superheat water to create the steam […]

Two days later, on September 12, Hei no Saemon and a group of soldiers abducted Nichiren from his hut at Matsubagayatsu, Kamakura. Their intent was to arrest and summarily behead him; but, according to legend, some sort of astronomical phenomena—a great flash of light—over the seaside Tatsunokuchi execution grounds terrified Nichiren’s executioners into inaction. The […]

PinkTentacle put it into words with succinct elegance; simultaneously capturing the history of the technology whilst communicating its current modern advance.
I tried for about 10 minutes to see how I could report this independently (the sources were listed) and failed.
Good job, PinkTentacle.
Good job, indeed.
In 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi, known as the “father of Japanese television,” transmitted […]

Remember the hoverbike chase in Akira through the tunnel system underneath Tokyo?
Those tunnels actually exist … dig the pictures.
These pictures are not of a space station or space ship but of Japanese sewer system. Japanese water drainage system, looks like an alien space ship.
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