Robot Friends, Lab Meat and Nuclear Leaks - the Future now

It's funny, I was just like 'ohh lets do one of those 'What's in the News' posts', I click over to BBC news and see lab grown burgers, Fukushima instability and talking robots in space, it feels like I'm looking at the news from a year ago still. I talked about the nuclear power station here and growing meat and robots that learn here.

So Fukushima update... Basically the site is still dangerous, now due to groundwater leaks the Pacific Ocean is being contaminated with radioactivity making it incredibly dangerous to life on a large scale. Apparently ti's been an issue for months but only coming out now. I read somewhere the other day about sunflower heads being very good at absorbing radiation actually. But this is on such a large scale and they need to stop the leaks first of all. Actually in the new Wolverine movie there was a scene with the atomic bomb and it was quite disturbing, all of his skin burnt off but the guy under the metal door was fine.

And now the burger! They can still only make small amounts of meat because otherwise they would need to create artificial circulatory systems but obviously the larger the bulk they can make the cheaper it will be. Google is one of the main backers at the moment which surprised me. What also surprised me was the use of stem cells for the research which I know is controversial. It does raise many issues still over unknown sideeffects and what it would mean for vegetarians on religious grounds. But then world hunger is such a strong counter argument its hard not to hope this goes well.

The robot is kind of slightly disappointing... It seems to be more of a psychological study rather than doing any particular task. The description of its twin being on earth makes me feel like this is a Disney cartoon just waiting to happen and actually the design was modeled on Astro boy so that's not far off.