ANS TechGlance

This seems to be a typical product made by a sophisticated consortium formed up by The Niigata Industrial Creation Organization, Hitachi,  Takei Scientific Instruments Co.,Ltd. and NEDO.  The Niigata  The Niigata Industrial Creation Organization and Hitachi reportedly provided Takei with exercise methods and robot technology, which they developed as part of a project funded by NEDO.  In general "exercise" is "exercise" and it's sometimes boring. Building entertainment functions into the training or exercising process is good for continuous effort of exercising for a long time although it seems to be a matter of cost and performance. Source: DigInfo TV via YouTube 2/7/11

This newly designed EV look good for entertainment and hobby but could be quite useful for sightseeing in traditional cities in Japan, like Kyoto, Nara etc. It might be also applicable in East Asia, too. A price plan sounds quite reasonable. Try it? Source: DigInfo Tv via YouTube 2/7/11

Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Institute (AIST) announced that Humanoid Research Group of AIST had developed new software, "Chorenoid", to directly generate and edit the whole-body motion of a humanoid robot. Its news release says, " This software automatically and instantaneously converts a sequence of humanoid poses (key poses) input by the user to a dynamically stable movements, enabling a user without knowledge of robotics to generate various humanoid movements easily in a similar manner to the generation of a computer graphic character's motions. This technology is expected to contribute to the creation of new content industries using humanoid robots. " The following video demonstrates a dancing cybernetic humanoid robot HRP-4C. It is expected that the software will create a new market for TV, PCs,  games and other entertainment areas. Source: AIST's news release 1/9/11

Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) announced on November 24, 2010 that AIST successfully demonstrated  operations of  a new type of organic photovoltaic devices (solar cells organic) using optical absorption due to charge transfer between the different organic molecules.  Organic solar cells are expected as new technology for manufacturing solar cell sheets that can be bent, lightweight, and now, have been actively studied and developed worldwide.  This time,  successful photoelectric conversion from near infrared light over the wavelength of one μm  was confirmed using the  photovoltaic devices fabricated using organic molecules consisting of two molecules. This technology based on the new principle w ill enable more effective energy conversion from the light to electricity. Source: AIST's News Release (Japanese) 12/1/10

RIKEN has announced that its researchers have   successfully developed a revolutionary new polymer film that changes shape upon irradiation with UV and visible light.  The announcement continues, " Described in  Science , the film is the largest-ever example of a material whose molecular elements are ordered in three dimensions on a macroscopic length scale, marking a breakthrough in techniques for molecular design and processing." When this technology becomes popular, the direct conversion of light energy into a mechanical force may enable us to obtain a highly efficient energy conversion method from the solar light energy. Source: RIKEN News Release 11/17/10

New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) announced today that NEDO and the World Bank singed an agreement on the implementation of cooperative activities in the field of energy and environmental technology in October 21, 2010.  According to the announcement, the agreement allows both parties to jointly implement the cooperative activities in an effort to resolve global energy and environmental issues through technology demonstrative project that NEDO is promoting to encourage energy conservation as well as to introduce renewable energy sources, in addition to the collaborative activities within the scope of the ECO2 2010 Cities Initiative launched by the World Bank (  www.worldbank.org/eco2  ). NEDO has been taking initiatives on experimental projects of renewable energy and energy saving in Asia and other countries.  The agreement is expected to accelerate to promote sustainable urban development and low carbon economies and societies....

Nova Energy, an entrepreneurial company based in Hyogo Japan, developed tidal power generation systems and started its trial testing off the coast of Awaji City in the first half of the year  2010. The key component of the system is a tuna shaped turbine "MAGURO TURBINE", of which type number NT-001 has a 6-meter-long body with a 3 meter-diameter of propeller, is designed to generate 10kw at 3 knot tide current speed.　Maguro Turbine is not actually for generating electric power but to generate oil pressure power which is transformed to rotate oil turbines for electric power generation. 　For a country surrounded by the sea, like Japan, there could be huge potential to use the sea power of clean energy.  We do hope the trial will be successfully completed together with a reasonable cost performance result. Source: News archives on Nova Energy's  web site (Japanese)              A TV program uploaded on YouTube (Japanese) 10/7/...