One of the best things about robots is they never get sick – but they can be programmed to pretend that they are sick, like the android patient that a Japanese team have developed to provide realistic simulations of ailments for med students to diagnose.

Further medical robotics news comes in the form of a delightful story about a two centimeter long device designed for swimmming around in a patient’s gastrointestinal tract to diagnose and treat ailments. I feel better already!

Here’s a way of generating wind-power without building those (allegedly) ugly windmills all over the place – a skyscraper whose floors are rotated independently around a central shaft by the wind, construction of which is due to start in Dubai before the end of the year. Words really can’t do the idea justice, you’ll have to click through for the pictures and animations … while you’re there, you can check out the skepticism of the commenters, who have a good point – wouldn’t you end up being pushed toward the outer edges by centrifugal force?

Jet-lag is no fun, as anyone who has experienced it is sure to tell you. But if you were staying on Mars for any length of time, the slightly longer than 24-hour days would make you feel like you had an unshakeable case of jet-lag – which wouldn’t be conducive to working efficiently, to say the least. Hence NASA’s recent experiments, which have discovered that brief exposures to bright light in the evening can help the Circadian rhythms of the body adjust to longer days. They hypothesise that this may be a useful treatment for insomnia and other sleep disorders, too, but I doubt it’ll offer much help to the crazy guy trying to break the world record for sleep deprivation.

The ‘frontier’ feel of virtual worlds like Second Life is a large part of their appeal, as the lax rules allow people to engage in activities that may be more restricted back in the conceptual Old World. This mostly takes the form of harmless cultural behaviours, with scatterings of deviancy that is circumscribed for very good reasons. But a think-tank of UK accountants are flagging up a warning on the potential of virtual economies to be used as money laundering systems, and recommend that they are treated in the same way as any meatspace bank or institution. The question is, will legislation be able to keep up with the technology?

The social sciences have the unique remit of slowly and steadily gathering evidence in support of phenomena that are considered tautologies. Take for example the work of Dr. Alan Bentley of Durham University, who has been researching models of large-scale human behaviour which demonstrate that a vast percentage of people make cultural choices on the basis of what ‘innovators’ are perceived to be doing. Sounds self-evident, doesn’t it? But the implications aren’t so good, especially if the same attitudes extend to, say, voting or financial habits. Says Dr. Bentley:

“When political agendas are constantly changing, it’s a sign that politicians are copying each other rather than thinking for themselves.”

Another self-evident truth confirmed, eh?