Scientists are monitoring a defunct Chinese space station that is expected to fall to Earth sometime this weekend — the largest man-made object to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a decade.

The head of the European Space Agency’s debris office, Holger Krag, says China’s Tiangong-1 space station likely will fall to Earth Sunday.

Krag said it still not yet known where the space station will hit Earth, but said it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to be injured when it does.

“Our experience is that for such large objects typically between 20 and 40 percent of the original mass, of 8.5 tons, will survive re-entry and then could be found on the ground, theoretically,” he said.

“However, to be injured by one of these fragments is extremely unlikely. My estimate is that the probability to be injured by one of these fragments is similar to the probability of being hit by lightning twice in the same year,” Krag added.

China’s first space lab, Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace 1″ — was launched in 2011 as a facility for testing docking capabilities with other Chinese spacecraft and to explore the possibilities for building a larger permanent space station by 2023.

Chinese astronauts visited it several times flying aboard the Shenzhou spacecraft.

It was scheduled for a controlled de-orbit and eventual crash into the Pacific Ocean, but in September 2016 China’s space agency conceded it had lost contact with the station.

Krag, says the 8-and-a-half ton craft will re-enter the atmosphere at a speed of 27,000 kilometers per hour.

He said the space station is expected to fall between the areas of 43 degrees south and 43 degrees north, and everything outside that zone is considered safe.

“Northern Europe including France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland are definitely on the safe side. Southern Europe, the southern part of North America, South Asia, Africa, Australia and also South America are still within the zone today,” he said.

The re-entry area covers huge parts of the Earth’s oceans, so any surviving pieces of the space station are most likely to end up at the bottom of the sea.

 
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Researchers in Australia have begun an ambitious task to learn more about the long-term impacts of head injuries suffered by athletes. This week, the Australian Sports Brain Bank was launched in Sydney, and experts are encouraging players who have participated in all levels of sport – whether or not they’ve had a head injury – to donate their brains to the cause after they die.

The Brain Bank has been set up to investigate links between concussion, head injuries and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.  It is a neurodegenerative disease found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma.

The Australian study is being supported by American researchers, who set up a similar brain bank a decade ago.

Dr. Chris Nowinski, head of the Boston-based Concussion Legacy Foundation which has examined the brains of deceased National Football League players, says the presence of CTE among them is pervasive.

“Any contact sport where you receive repetitive brain trauma puts you at risk for this disease.  We do not know at what risk but we have seen CTE in 110 of the first 111 players that we have studied, which has really surprised us.”

Nowinski believes energy from blows to the head during competition causes brain tissue to move.  Symptoms of CTE include depression, aggression and memory loss, and can take years or decades to appear.

The cause of CTE has yet to be established, but the disease has prompted a class action lawsuit in the U.S.

Australia’s Brain Bank is a joint venture between Sydney University and the city’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.  It hopes to obtain 500 brains over the next 10 years.

 
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Chef Rob Morasco didn’t set out to make a planet-friendly burger.

But the 25 percent mushroom burger he created at food service company Sodexo not only has a lower carbon footprint, it’s also lower in calories, fat and salt.

It’s juicier, too.

“When you bite into it, it’s kind of like a flavor explosion,” Morasco said. “And you don’t taste the mushrooms, either.”

And because mushrooms are cheaper than beef, he could answer customer demand for antibiotic- and hormone-free burgers “without having to jack up the price,” he said.

Mushroom-blended burgers have been catching on among both chefs and environmentalists. In March, Sonic Drive-In became the first fast-food chain to offer them.

WATCH: These Burgers Are Better for the Planet, but You’d Never Know It

​2 million cars

Americans eat about 10 billion hamburgers each year, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).

All those burgers take a toll on the planet.

Beef is “the most resource-intensive food that we commonly eat,” Richard Waite of WRI said.

Beef accounts for about half the greenhouse gases produced by the American diet, he added. Cows take far more feed, land and water than any other source of protein.

If every burger in America were blended with mushrooms, WRI estimates the greenhouse-gas savings would be like taking more than 2 million cars off the road.

It would save as much water as nearly 3 million American households use in a year. And it would reduce the demand for farmland by an area larger than the state of Maryland.

For the carnivore

Blended burgers are part of The Culinary Institute of America and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Menus of Change project, challenging chefs across the food industry to make their meals healthier and more sustainable.

Demand for meatless meals is growing along with rising health and environmental concerns. There are bean burgers, soy burgers, even beet-infused veggie burgers that “bleed.”

But it’s a limited market.

“The veggie burgers tend to cater to folks who identify as vegetarian or vegan, or actively want to be eating less meat,” Waite said.

On the other hand, blended burgers appeal to “the real carnivores, someone who really loves meat,” he added. “This is potentially a dish that could have broad mainstream appeal and also pretty big environmental benefits.”

Helps keep burgers juicy

Chefs say the mushrooms retain water, helping the burger stay juicy as it cooks.

Sonic Drive-In’s ads for its new Signature Slinger blended burger play up the juiciness and the lower calories.

“When you’re about something that is going to be better for you, it had better deliver the flavor first,” said Scott Uehlein, vice president for product innovation and development at Sonic Drive-In.

The company is piloting the burgers in a two-month trial run.

And the potential goes beyond burgers.

About 400 cafeterias, universities and hospitals are using Sodexo’s blended beef to prepare not only burgers, but lasagna, chili, meatballs, meatloaf and more. The company has adapted 30 popular recipes to use its mushroom blend.

“All those different things you can make with that product just like you would make with regular ground beef,” chef Morasco said.
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As the world’s population heads toward 10 billion by midcentury, experts are wrestling with how to feed the world without wrecking the planet. It’s not easy to find foods with lower environmental impact that still taste as good as the ones they are intended to replace. But chefs and environmentalists are both cheering one new menu item: the mushroom-blended burger. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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China’s defunct and reportedly out-of-control Tiangong 1 space station is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime this weekend. It poses only a slight risk to people and property on the ground, since most of the bus-size, 8.5-ton vehicle is expected to burn up on re-entry, although space agencies don’t know exactly when or where that will happen.

Below are some questions and answers about the station, its re-entry, and the past and future of China’s ambitious space program.

What will happen and how great is the danger?

The European Space Agency predicts the station will re-enter the atmosphere between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon — an estimate it calls “highly variable,” likely because the ever-changing shape of the upper atmosphere affects the speed of objects falling into it.

The Chinese space agency’s latest estimate puts re-entry between Saturday and Wednesday.

Western space experts say they believe China has lost control of the station. China’s chief space laboratory designer Zhu Zongpeng has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn’t provided specifics on what, if anything, China is doing to guide the craft’s re-entry.

Based on Tiangong 1’s orbit, it will come to Earth somewhere between latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, or roughly somewhere over most of the United States, China, Africa, southern Europe, Australia and South America. Out of range are Russia, Canada and northern Europe.

Based on its size, only about 10 percent of the spacecraft will likely survive being burned up on re-entry, mainly its heavier components such as its engines. The chances of anyone on Earth being hit by debris is considered less than one in a trillion.

Ren Guoqiang, China’s defense ministry spokesman, told reporters Thursday that Beijing has been briefing the United Nations and the international community about Tiangong 1’s re-entry through multiple channels.

​How common is man-made space debris?

Debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but only one person is known to have been hit by any of it: American woman Lottie Williams, who was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997. 

Most famously, America’s 77-ton Skylab crashed through the atmosphere in 1979, spreading pieces of wreckage near the southwestern Australia city of Perth, which fined the U.S. $400 for littering.

The breakup on re-entry of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 killed all seven astronauts and sent more than 80,000 pieces of debris raining down on a large swath of the southern United States. No one on the ground was injured.

In 2011, NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was considered to pose a slight risk to the public when it came down to Earth 20 years after its launching. Debris from the 6-ton satellite ended up falling into the Pacific Ocean, causing no damage. 

China’s own space program raised major concerns after it used a missile to destroy an out-of-service Chinese satellite in 2007, creating a large and potentially dangerous cloud of debris. 

What is Tiangong 1 and what was it used for?

Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China’s first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station.

The station, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace,” played host to two crewed missions that included China’s first female astronauts and served as a test platform for perfecting docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016. Since then it has been orbiting gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.

The station had two modules, one for its solar panels and engines, and one for a pair of astronauts to live in and conduct experiments. A third astronaut slept in the Shenzhou spaceships that docked with the station, which also contained facilities for personal hygiene and food preparation.

​How advanced is China’s space program?

Since China conducted its first crewed mission in 2003 — becoming only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so — it has taken on increasingly ambitious projects, including staging a spacewalk and landing its Jade Rabbit rover on the moon.

China now operates the Tiangong 2 precursor space station facility, while the permanent station’s 20-ton core module is due to be launched this year. The completed 60-ton station is set to come into full service in 2022 and operate for at least a decade.

China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program’s strong military connections. China’s space program remains highly secretive and some experts have complained that a lack of information about Tiangong 1’s design has made it harder to predict what might happen upon its re-entry.

A mission to land another rover on Mars and bring back samples is set to launch in 2020. China also plans to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon.
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Girls who spend the most time on social media at age 10 may be unhappier in their early teens than peers who use social media less during the tween years, a U.K. study suggests.

Researchers looked at social media use and scores on tests of happiness and other aspects of well-being among boys and girls at age 10 and each year until age 15. Overall, well-being decreased with age for boys and girls, but more so for girls. And high social media use early on predicted sharper increases in unhappiness for girls later.

For boys, social media use at 10 had no association with well-being in the midteens, which suggests that other factors are more important influences on well-being changes in boys, the authors note in BMC Public Health.

A pattern for girls

“Our findings suggest that young girls, those aged 10, who are more interactive with social media have lower levels of well-being by age 15 than their peers who interact with social media less at age 10. We did not find any similar patterns for boys, suggesting that any changes in their well-being may not be due to social media,” said lead author Cara Booker, a researcher at the University of Essex.

Booker’s research group had done a previous study of social media use and well-being in adolescents, but wanted to explore how it changes over time, she said in an email. They had also noticed gender differences and wanted to look more closely at them, she added.

The study team analyzed data on nearly 10,000 teens from a large national survey of U.K. households conducted annually from 2009 to 2015. The researchers focused on how much time young participants spent chatting on social media on a typical school day.

The survey also contained questions about “strengths and difficulties” that assessed emotional and behavioral problems, and researchers generated a happiness score based on responses to other questions about school, family and home life.

Social media use

The researchers found that adolescent girls used social media more than boys, though social media interaction increased with age for both boys and girls.

At age 13, about a half of girls were interacting on social media for more than one hour a day, compared to just one-third of boys.

By age 15, girls continued to use social media more than boys, with about 60 percent of girls and just less than half of the boys interacting on social media for one or more hours per day.

Social and emotional difficulties declined with age for boys, but rose for girls.

It’s possible that girls are more sensitive than boys to social comparisons and interactions that impact self-esteem, the authors write. Or that the sedentary time spent on social media impacts health and happiness in other ways.

“Many hours of daily use may not be ideal,” Booker said.

Digitally literacy needed

The study cannot prove whether or how social media interactions affect young people’s well-being. The authors note that compared to girls, boys may spend more time gaming than chatting online, yet gaming has become increasingly social so it’s possible that it also has an effect that they did not examine in this study.

Parents should become more digitally literate as well as teach their children how to positively interact with social media, Booker said. Dealing with filtered posts and mostly positive posts may lead to incorrect conclusions about others’ lives that lead to lower levels of well-being, she noted.

“I don’t want people to come away with the idea that social media is bad, just that increased use at a young age may be detrimental for girls,” she said.

More research needs to be done on why and whether this persists into adulthood, Booker added.
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The United States is on track to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw from the accord, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday.

Guterres said emissions-cutting plans put in motion by American businesses, regional governments and cities meant that the goals set by the former U.S. administration, which signed the deal in 2016 were within reach.

“We have seen in the cities, and we have seen in many states, a very strong commitment to the Paris agreement, to the extent that some indicators are moving even better than in the recent past,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.

“There are expectations that, independently of the position of the administration, the U.S. might be able to meet the commitments made in Paris as a country.”

Greenhouse gas emissions

Under the deal, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Nearly 200 countries and parties have signed the landmark agreement after intense negotiations in Paris, where all nations made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges running to 2030.

The agreement is aimed at limiting global warming to within two degrees Celsius, but Guterres warned that more action was needed by 2020 to reach that goal.

Withdrawal notice due in 2019

Trump faced condemnation when he announced in June 2017 that the United States was pulling out, painting the accord as a “bad deal” for the U.S. economy.

Under the agreement, the United States can formally give notice that it plans to withdraw in 2019, three years after the accord came into force, and the withdrawal would become effective in 2020.

Describing climate change as “the most systemic threat to humankind,” Guterres said recent data on extreme weather events showed that “2017 was filled with climate chaos.”

“2018 has already brought more of the same,” he said. “Food security, health, stability itself all hang in the balance.”

Guterres is planning to host a major summit next year to take stock of progress in implementing the climate deal, but it remains unlikely that Trump would attend.

Plan to loosen emissions, fuel standards

Though Guterres said the U.S. is on track to meet Paris climate agreement targets, the Trump administration still has the ability to change current regulations.

The New York Times reported Thursday, citing an Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman, that the White House was expected to push a plan to loosen standards on emissions and vehicle fuel economy standards, undercutting the previous administration’s bid to fight climate change.

Such a move would represent a win for automakers, potentially paving the way to lower the bar for standards globally.
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A Los Angeles judge Thursday ordered coffee companies to abide by California state law and put cancer warning labels on their products.

A nonprofit group called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics is suing such popular coffee roasters and retailers as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s. They say the companies fail to warn consumers that roasting coffee naturally produces a carcinogen called acrylamide.

In the first part of the three-phase trial, Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled the coffee companies failed to prove their assertion that there is no significant risk from acrylamide.

In Thursday’s ruling after the second phase, Berle said the companies failed to adequately show coffee is a healthy drink.

“Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving by a preponderance of evidence that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health,” he wrote.

An upcoming third phase would decide what civil penalties the coffee companies would have to pay.

Company officials have not yet responded to the judge’s ruling.

Acrylamide forms naturally when such foods as coffee, hot wheat cereals and potatoes are cooked or deep fried.

Most medical studies show no increased risk of cancer from eating such foods.

Some recent studies have shown possible benefits from drinking coffee, including protection against liver disease, some diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
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The pursuit of happiness is among the unalienable rights listed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and so it is no wonder that the study of that elusive treasure makes for one of the most popular classes in the country. A record 1,200 students are attending a class that teaches students how to be happier at prestigious Yale University in the U.S. state of Connecticut. As VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, many more are enrolled in the Yale happiness course online.
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It’s a double cosmic conundrum: Lots of stuff that was already invisible has gone missing.

Astronomers have found a distant galaxy where there is no dark matter.

Dark matter is called “dark” because it can’t be seen. It is the mysterious and invisible skeleton of the universe that scientists figure makes up about 27 percent of the cosmos. Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars.

It’s supposed to be everywhere.

What you see is what you get

But Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues spied a vast, old galaxy with relatively few stars where what you see truly is what you get. The galaxy’s stars are speeding around with no apparent influence from dark matter, according to a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

Instead of shaking the very foundations of physics, scientists say this absence of dark matter may help prove the existence of, wait for it, dark matter.

“Not sure what to make of it, but it is definitely intriguing,” wrote Case Western Reserve astronomer Stacy McGaugh, who was not part of the study, in an email. “This is a weird galaxy.”

Van Dokkum studies diffuse galaxies, ones that cover enormous areas but have relatively few stars. To look for them he and colleagues built their own makeshift telescope out of 48 telephoto lenses that he first tested by using a toy flashlight to shine a light on a paper clip. The bug-eyed telescope, called Dragonfly, peers into the sky from New Mexico.

Using Dragonfly, van Dokkum and colleagues found a large, sparse galaxy called NGC1052-DF2 in the northern constellation Cetus, also known as the whale. It’s as big as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of its stars. Then they used larger telescopes on Hawaii and eventually the Hubble Space Telescope to study the galaxy.

Slow-moving stars

Even though the galaxy is mostly empty, they found clusters of densely grouped stars. With measurements from the telescopes, van Dokkum and colleagues calculated how fast those clusters moved. If there were a normal amount of dark matter those clusters would be speeding around at 67,000 mph (108,000 kilometers per hour). Instead, the clusters were moving at 18,000 mph (28,000 kilometers per hour). That’s about how fast they would move if there were no dark matter at all, van Dokkum said.

The team also calculated the total mass of the galaxy and found the stars account for everything, with little or no room left for dark matter.

“I find this unlikely in all possible contexts,” said McGaugh, who is a proponent of a “modified gravity” theory that excludes the existence of dark matter altogether. “That doesn’t make it wrong, just really weird.”

How could this absence of dark matter help prove that it exists? By potentially disproving modified gravity theories that suggest gravity acts in a way that the cosmos makes sense without dark matter. But those alternative theories require stars in this galaxy to zip at least twice as fast as they were seen moving in this study.

More dark matter, not none

Other outside scientists said the initial look at the calculations appear to be correct, though the results are confounding. A galaxy with so few stars should have more dark matter than others, not none.

“These are very strong scientists and so I take the results very seriously,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University.

One outsider suggested that perhaps the “galaxy” van Dokkum studied is so diffuse that it may not really be a galaxy. Another suggested that the dark matter might just be outside of the area that van Dokkum measured.

A true surprise

Van Dokkum dismissed both possibilities. 

“It’s sort of non-negotiable. There’s nothing else, just the stars,” he said. The only way this can be explained is if dark matter exists in the universe, just not in that galaxy, he said.

There’s no good explanation for why and how this galaxy has no dark matter, van Dokkum said. He proposed four different possibilities, all unproven. His favorite: That the galaxy formed in the very early universe in a way astronomers have never seen or understood.

“It’s not so often you get a true surprise,” van Dokkum said.
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The search for life’s sweetest but most elusive treasure — happiness — brings nearly 1,200 Yale University undergraduates twice a week into an

enormous hall on the Connecticut school’s campus for its most popular class ever.

“Psychology and the Good Life” is such a hit that one in four undergraduate students at the Ivy League university is enrolled in the spring semester course, said Laurie Santos, the psychology professor who teaches the class. It is the largest class enrollment size in the history of Yale, founded in 1701.

 What is the draw? Santos says it is the hope that science can help students find blissful relief from the misery that has reached at all-time high at colleges.

“Students report being more depressed than they have ever been in history at college, more anxious,” she said.

Social science has generated many new insights into what makes people happy and how they can achieve that, Santos said. “They really want to learn those insights in an empirical, science-driven way,” she said, referring to students enrolled in the course.

The third-oldest university in the United States, Yale boasts many famous alumni, including presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and actors Paul Newman and Meryl Streep.

Socialization, exercise, sleep

Santos said feelings of happiness are fostered through socialization, exercise, meditation and plenty of sleep. Money and possessions are often seen as goals in the game of life, but the route to happiness heads in a different direction, she said.

“Very happy people spend time with others, they prioritize time with their friends, time with their family, they even take time to talk to the barista,” Santos said.

She points to the psychological phenomenon of “mis-wanting,” which leads people to pursue the wrong goals in life.

“We work really hard to get a great salary or to buy this huge house,” she said. “Those things are not going to make us as happy as we think.”

Homework assignments for the class, also known as Psyc 157, include showing more gratitude, performing acts of kindness and bumping up social connections.

Because of overwhelming demand, the course is now being offered free to the public, through Coursera.org.

On campus, the class is already paying off for Yale senior Rebekah Siliezar, who described her previous mindset.

“What’s most pressing on our minds is grades, it’s the next job, it’s a potential salary after graduation,” said Siliezar, whose family lives in suburban Chicago. Now, she said, “I really try to focus on the present moment and the people around me.”
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Paro the furry seal cries softly while an elderly woman pets it. Pepper, a humanoid, waves while leading a group of senior citizens in exercises. The upright Tree guides a disabled man taking shaky steps, saying in a gentle feminine voice, “right, left, well done!”

Robots have the run of Tokyo’s Shin-tomi nursing home, which uses 20 different models to care for its residents. The Japanese government hopes it will be a model for harnessing the country’s robotics expertise to help cope with a swelling elderly population and dwindling workforce.

Allowing robots to help care for the elderly — a job typically seen as requiring a human touch — may be a jarring idea in the West. But many Japanese see them positively, largely because they are depicted in popular media as friendly and

helpful.

“These robots are wonderful,” said 84-year-old Kazuko Yamada after the exercise session with SoftBank Robotics Corp.’s Pepper, which can carry on scripted dialogues. “More people live alone these days, and a robot can be a conversation partner for them. It will make life more fun.”

Plenty of obstacles may hinder a rapid proliferation of elder care robots: high costs, safety issues and doubts about how useful — and user-friendly — they will be.

The Japanese government has been funding development of elder care robots to help fill a projected shortfall of 380,000 specialised workers by 2025.

Despite steps by Japan to allow foreign workers in for elder care, obstacles to employment in the sector, including exams in Japanese, remain. As of the end of 2017, only 18 foreigners held nursing care visas, a new category created in 2016.

But authorities and companies here are also eyeing a larger prize: a potentially lucrative export industry supplying robots to places such as Germany, China and Italy, which face similar demographic challenges now or in the near future.

“It’s an opportunity for us,” said Atsushi Yasuda, director of the robotic policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or METI. “Other countries will follow the same trend.”

More than 100 foreign groups have visited Shin-tomi the past year from countries including China, South Korea and the Netherlands.

A few products are trickling out as exports: Panasonic Corp has started shipping its robotic bed, which transforms into a wheelchair, to Taiwan. Paro is used as a “therapy animal” in about 400 Danish senior homes.

Still tiny

The global market for nursing care and disabled aid robots, made up of mostly Japanese manufacturers, is still tiny: just $19.2 million in 2016, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

But METI estimates the domestic industry alone will grow to 400 billion yen ($3.8 billion) by 2035, when a third of Japan’s population will be 65 or older.

“It’s potentially a huge market,” said George Leeson, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. “Everyone is waking up to their ageing populations. Clearly robotics is part of that package to address those needs.”

To nurture the industry, the government is using a two-pronged approach. METI is promoting development, providing 4.7 billion yen ($45 million) in subsidies since 2015.

The Labor Ministry is spearheading the spread of robots, and spent 5.2 billion yen ($50 million) to introduce them into 5,000 facilities nationwide in the year that ended last March.

There is no government data about how many care facilities use robots.

Government officials stress that robots will not replace human caregivers.

“They can assist with power, mobility and monitoring. They can’t replace humans, but they can save time and labor,” said METI’s Yasuda. “If workers have more time, they can do other tasks.”

That’s a robot?

Most of the devices look nothing like the popular image of a robot. By the government’s definition, each has three components — sensors, a processor and a motor or apparatus.

Panasonic used government aid to develop Resyone, a bed that splits in two, with one half transforming into a wheelchair.

Cyberdyne Inc’s HAL — short for Hybrid Assistive Limb — lumbar type is a powered back support that helps caregivers lift people.

Those needing walking rehabilitation can grab hold of Tree, made by unlisted Reif Co, which crawls along the ground, showing where to place the next step and offering balance support.

SoftBank’s Pepper is used in about 500 Japanese elder care homes for games, exercise routines and rudimentary conversations.

But some workers find Pepper difficult to set up, said Shohei Fujiwara, a manager at SoftBank Robotics, a unit of Internet conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. They’d like Pepper to respond to voice commands and move around independently – functions that SoftBank hopes to introduce this year, he said.

A costly solution

Cute, furry and responsive, Paro reacts to touch, speech and light by moving its head, blinking its eyes and playing recordings of Canadian harp seal cries.

“When I first petted it, it moved in such a cute way. It really seemed like it was alive,” giggled 79-year-old Saki Sakamoto, a Shin-tomi resident. “Once I touched it, I couldn’t let go.”

Paro took more than 10 years to develop and received about $20 million in government support, said its inventor, Takanori Shibata, chief research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. About 5,000 are in use globally, including 3,000 in Japan.

But Paro, like most robots, is expensive: 400,000 yen ($3,800) in Japan and about 5,000 euros in Europe. Panasonic’s Resyone bed costs 900,000 yen ($8,600) and Cyberdyne’s HAL lumbar exoskeleton costs 100,000 yen ($950) a month to rent.

Most facilities using them, including Shin-tomi, have relied on local and central government subsidies to help cover the costs. Individuals can also use nursing care insurance to help cover approved products, but those numbers are tiny.

And so far, the robots have not reduced Shin-tomi’s personnel costs or working hours.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” said Kimiya Ishikawa, president and CEO of Silverwing Social Welfare Corp, which runs Shin-tomi. “We brought them in mostly to improve the working environment, keep staffers from getting back injuries and make things safer.”

What they have done, he said, is boost the morale of both staff and residents.

“That’s brought a peace of mind among the staff and the residents feel supported,” he said.
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