While robots are a long way from matching human emotional complexity, the country 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.

There are robots serving as receptionists, vacuuming office corridors, spoon-feeding the elderly. They serve tea, greet company guests and chatter away at public technology displays. Now start-ups are marching out robotic home helpers.

"The cost of machinery is going down, while labor costs are rising," said Eimei Onaga, CEO of Innovation Matrix Inc., a company that distributes Japanese robotics technology in the U.S. "Soon, robots could even replace low-cost workers at small firms, greatly boosting productivity." That's just what the Japanese government has been counting on. A 2007 national technology roadmap by the Trade Ministry calls for 1 million industrial robots to be installed throughout the country by 2025. A single robot can replace about 10 employees, the roadmap assumes — meaning Japan's future million-robot army of workers could take the place of 10 million humans. That's about 15% of the current workforce.

A Japanese version of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, albeit a rather awkward and clumsy one? Japan’s latest humanoid robot, HRP-4C has 30 motors in her body that enable her to walk and move her limbs. Looking pretty and petit at 5 ft with dark shoulder-length hair, the walking, talking female robot can spot different facial expressions to express different emotions such as anger, surprise and delight.

With today's news that Apple is planning a May 31st shutdown for Lala Media, the streaming music service it acquired last December, speculation has arisen that Apple may be on the verge of launching its own cloud-based version of iTunes. MediaMemo reports, however, that industry sources are indicating that such a move would have to occur a bit further down the road.

During several weeks in February, iDefense tracked an effort to sell log-in data for 1.5 million Facebook accounts on several online criminal marketplaces, including one called Carder.su.

By now you'd think folks would know what to let fly on Facebook and what to keep to themselves. Not so.

Renault has unveiled the final production versions of two new all-electric cars, one of which will be the foundation of the Better Place network in Israel. Prospective customers are now able to visit Renault’s website to reserve the Fluence Z.E. sedan and Kangoo Z.E. van, both of which have a 100 mile range and will be available in 2011. Most importantly, the Fluence Z.E. is the first production-ready car that can take advantage of Better Place’s battery swapping system. Renault says that in addition to a conventional plug-in charge, a Fluence’s depleted battery can be swapped for a fully-charged one in under three minutes.

The BBC reports that a trio of fennec foxes has been successfully bred in captivity–a first. And, holy moly, these are the cutest little things I have ever seen. Share this daily “awww” with your kids today!

Editor and self-proclaimed nerd Brian Ashcraft of the very fine video game blog Kotaku explains why he gave his son a Tezuka-inspired name: “To fulfill his destiny as a nerd. Let’s be honest. I am a nerd. Perhaps, you are a nerd, too. We could even been kindred nerd spirits or bitter nerd enemies nerd-raging at each other. In raising my son, I have three goals: He is polite and considerate, he works hard and he becomes a nerd.”

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with public works.

The 15 percent of the world's 32 million cataloged books that are in the public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the universal library.

On both counts the authors and publishers accused Google of blatant copyright infringement. When negotiations failed last fall, the Authors Guild and five big publishing companies sued Google.

Flip phones may be somewhat on the outs these days (at least among those demanding the latest and greatest), but they may well be the key to future 3D cellphones -- at least if this Motorola patent application is any indication. The basic idea is actually a fairly simple one: you'd see a regular 2D image on the screen when the cover is open, but when it's closed you'd be able to look through the transparent lid and see the images with a "three dimensional appearance." As you can probably figure out, that screen would be a touchscreen that takes the place of a keypad, and another illustration also shows that the same idea could be applied to a slider phone. Of course, what the illustrations don't show is how effective that three dimensional appearance would actually be, although it seems like it could give Motoblur a whole new meaning.

Samsung Electronics is introducing 15 3-D television models with a live-action three-dimensional commercial created by the same technical production company that made “Avatar,” James Cameron’s popular film.

A computer in Logan, Utah, holds syllabus details, lecture notes, problem sets and exams from more than 80 Utah State University courses: but this is no secret cheat-sheet site put together by rogue hackers and pirates. Anyone, anywhere, with an Internet connection — from Bill Gates down — can log on and download these materials without cost. The site, Utah State OpenCourseWare, http://ocw.usu.edu, is part of the OpenCourseWare network, itself part of an educational resources movement dedicated to opening and reshaping global access to higher education.

The critical question is whether soils release more CO2 because faster-growing plants pump more in, or if soils release CO2 that would have stayed in the ground at lower temperatures. If the latter, the fresh influx of CO2 could produce a self-reinforcing cycle, producing higher temperatures that cause even more CO2 to be released. “That’s the $50,000 question: Is there a feedback effect?” said Ben Bond-Lamberty, a University of Maryland, College Park biogeochemist and co-author of the review, in the March 24 Nature. “The data we have implies a feedback. It doesn’t prove it, but it’s consistent with the possibility.” Carbon dioxide enters the soil through the roots of living plants and from the decaying bodies of dead plants, and is processed by microbes, fungi and insects. Over time, some of that CO2 releases back into the atmosphere. At any given time, there’s about twice as much CO2 in Earth’s soils as in its atmosphere.

One of the blokes from Top Gear was tooling around Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull in a Toyota pickup about a week before it blew and scientists who set up monitoring equipment just hours before the eruption used the same truck.

Most airports in northern Europe remained closed early today as ash from a volcanic eruption on Iceland continued to wreak havoc on air travel. Some European airlines made test flights over the weekend to assess the situation, and the industry wants the skies reopened.