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Japanese scientists have developed an incredibly real-looking female robot, made of soft silicone “skin” instead of hard plastic. It can blink and move its hands like a human, and even seems to breathe. Is this Blade Runner come to life, or does it mean we never need to be lonely again? Right now the android, called Repliee Q1, can only sit and flutter her eyelashes, but with 31 tiny motors in her upper body, all powered by remote-control, more movement will eventually be possible.

David Whitehouse writes in BBC News that its creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, claims that one day androids like this one will fool us into thinking they’re human.

Image: Osaka University
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Thirty years worth of secret UFO files are about to be released in Australia (we wish they would do that here in the US). The Northern Territory government has declassified documents about UFO activity in Darwin. One of these documents tells about an Air Force crew that saw a series of lights cross their path when they were getting ready to take off.

Eric Tlozek reports in the Northern Territory News that another document describes a sighting by a weather forecaster in 1966, who described a metallic gray object flying at high altitude, when there were no aircraft in the area at the time. Another file tells of a group of nurses who saw a silver UFO in broad daylight.
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There is a new case of Mad Cow Disease in the US, but we’re told it does not threaten our food supply, because the affected cow died on the farm where it was raised and its meat never entered the human food chain. The cow was burned and then buried, and the farm’s location is being kept secret.

The Agriculture Department’s John Clifford says that they are testing the cow’s brain tissue at its laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and they are sending out more of the tissue to be tested to a laboratory in Weybridge, England. While the animal died in April, the veterinarian who removed the brain says he “forgot” to send in the sample until last week. The most recent Mad Cow was born before 1997, when the US banned the adding ground-up cattle remains to cattle feed.
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Human footprints that are 40,000 years old have been discovered beside an ancient lake in Mexico. This means that human beings were in the Americas 30,000 years earlier than archeologists once thought.

Robert Adler writes in the July 9-15 issue of New Scientist that archeologists Chris Stringer and Silvia Gonzalez discovered the footprints in a quarry near the town of Puebla in ash from a nearby volcano. The fossilized footprints were made when the humans walked along the shore of a lake. They were submerged when the water level rose and thus were preserved in the lake sediment. Some of them were made by children. The scientists were able to date the prints because they found shells in the sediment, which have been carbon-dated to 38,000 years ago.
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