Geminoid F in her stage debut in a play in Japan. The android took part in a play alongside a human actress
Her performance could perhaps be described as being a little mechanical. But this new actress treading the boards in Tokyo has a good excuse: she's a robot.
Humanoid robot Geminoid F has appeared on stage alongside a human actress for the first time in a play called 'Sayonara,' or 'Goodbye', last week.
Geminoid F - a robot designed to look and act like a human - played alongside a human actress, American Bryerly Long. in a play directed by Japanese director Oriza Hirata.
Geminoid F remained seated on a chair throughout the performance, while she carried out conversations and monologues
'It won't be that a robot replaces human beings on a drama stage, it's more as if a new type of actor has emerged in the theatrical world,' said Hirata, who had already put on two plays featuring ordinary, non-android robots.
Long plays a girl suffering from a fatal illness whose parents hire an android carer and then abandon her. The android, made to resemble a part-Russian, part-Japanese woman with long hair parted in the middle, recites poetry to her.
Seated on a chair throughout the performance, the human-sized Geminoid F carried out conversations and monologues, dressed in a dark, scoop-necked shirt and dark trousers.
Her eyes blinked and her chest rose and fell as if she was breathing even as she spoke, smiled and looked surprised, though her faced lacked the depth of expression of a real person.
Her voice and gestures were created by an actress in a soundproof chamber behind the stage whose head and body movements were detected by a camera and replicated by the android. Microphones were used for her voice.
Geminoid F was produced by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a renowned robot designer at Osaka University in western Japan, whose usual androids come with a steep $1.2 million price tag.
American actress Bryerly Long worked alongside the robot in a Japanese play titled Sayonara. She said Geminioid F t lacks 'human presence', making her feel 'alone' on stage
A model (right) touches the face of a humanoid robot called 'Geminoid-F' shaped to resemble her
For the play, he modified one to give it only the bare essentials needed to preform the given acting, which cut costs to one-tenth of the usual. All the android's movements were carried out with only 12 motors.
'Androids can look very similar to human actors, but more than that, we can technically create a superior actor by featuring all the good techniques of human actors such as staring, moving and talking,' said Ishiguro.
Despite the raves, Geminoid F's human counterpart said she felt as if she was performing solo.
'There's a bit of distance. The robot has a quite particular position because it's got a voice, but it's not some kind of human presence,' Long said.
Some in the audience also had doubts.
'It looked like an android playing an android,' said 28-year-old Chihiro Aikawa. Hirata said androids are not only good actors but also great for boosting ticket sales. About 600 people were expected to watch the play over a two-day Tokyo run.
'All of their acting problems can ultimately be solved if I only invest enough time, and the audience always loves to see them acting,' he said.
The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded by lush green fields
Humans in the future could live in mini floating cities that drift across the Pacific as if on giant water lilies.
The startling new concept has been dreamed up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.
The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.
Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities.
A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right. Most people in this brave new world would live in a 1 kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.
The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in 'plains' also surrounding the tower - all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.
The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater.
The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent.
The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, can join together to form larger modules
The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative with extensive environmental technologies and recycling facilities built in
The cells would create zero waste and recycle every product and covert waste into energy using new green technologies. Islands of waste would drift around the ocean and could be ‘harvested’ to provide energy The location of the islands is key to their success too, the designers claim.
Each group of cells would be near the equator where the climate is at its most stable and a range of technologies would be used to protect the floating cities from tidal waves and extreme weather.
To protect the inhabitants from large waves, strong elastic membranes would be attached to the lagoons around the outer edge of the cells, with the shallows above the membranes standing 30 feet above sea level.
Shimizu scientists calculate that the water pressure difference between the lagoons and the ocean would limit the movement of the membranes and buffer the force of the open sea waves.
Seawalls as high as 100 feet could also be constructed. And tsunamis in the open sea are far less dangerous than those that hit coastal areas, the designers say.
A country consisting of one million people would be formed after modules joined together one by one
Lightning rods would be fitted around the circumference of the towers and mesh lightning conductors will be placed on the exterior walls to protect against lightning strikes.
Shimizu wants to develop the first cells by 2025 and is concentrating on developing the technologies to make it happen. The concept was displayed at a recent Japanese university conference.
This is the not the first outlandish idea that Shimizu has come up with. The firm also proposes encircling the moon in a belt of solar collectors that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth.
Babies are instinctively able to laugh but other sounds have to be learned
We are born to laugh - but learn to cry, research suggests.
Research suggests that giggling when tickled or chuckling at a joke is instinctive but most other 'emotional vocalisations' are picked up through experience.
Dutch researchers asked 16 volunteers, half of whom were deaf, to make the sounds behind a range of emotions without using words.
The interpretations of sadness, terror, relief, anger, hilarity and other emotions were then played back to 25 people with normal hearing, who were asked to name the emotion.
Only laughter and sighs of relief were easily identifiable on the tapes of the deaf volunteers, this week's New Scientist reports.
All the other sounds, including cries of terror and sobs of sadness, were much easier to guess when made by volunteers without hearing problems.
As the deaf volunteers would never have had the chance to hear other people laugh, it suggests that it is something that we are born knowing how to do.
But learning how to convey other emotions, such as sadness, comes with experience, an Acoustical Society of America conference will hear next week.
Researcher Disa Sauter, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, says that laughter and smiling likely evolved as ways of diffusing confrontation.
She said: 'Even other primates laugh, if you ticked a gorilla or orangutan.' Professor Sophie Scott, an expert in the biology of speech from London's Institute of Neuroscience, said: 'The laughter finding makes a great deal of sense and laughter has been described as being more like a different way of breathing than a way of speaking.'
But Professor David Ostry, of the University of Montreal, cautioned that deaf people may learn to laugh simply by watching how hearing people do it.
Learning more about which sounds are instinctive and which are picked up through experience could make it easier to work out when deaf babies are in distress.
The head airbag takes only 0.1 seconds to inflate, completely covering the bicycle riders head and neck
It is the perfect invention for those of us too vain to bother wearing a helmet while riding our bikes.
The 'Hvvding' helmet is an airbag 'collar' that springs into action within 0.1 seconds, covering the skull and neck of a rider in the event of an impact.
Roughly translated into English as the 'Chieftain' - the Hvvding was designed over six years by two Swedish industrial design students.
Designer Anna Haupt said the company hoped the airbag would hit the shops across Northern Europe and the UK in the spring next year.
It will first cost around £260 but Ms Haupt believes a lot of people have been crying out for an alternative to the helmet.
The team developed a system using a collar containing a folded airbag which is only inflates when sensors inside detect a sudden jolt.
A small helium gas cylinder inflates the collar in just 0.1 seconds and it remains inflated for several seconds after impact. The device has been 'tuned' by recreating hundreds of accidents using crash test dummies and real riders.
She said: 'The airbag is designed as a hood that surrounds and protects the rider's head.
The collar can be covered in different fabrics and designs so it can be worn with your normal clothes, the designers claim
'The release mechanism is controlled by sensors that detects the abnormal motion of the cyclist in an accident.'
The inventors say that the colour of the collar can even be changed to match whatever outfit the cyclist is wearing. The hood itself is made from a durable nylon fabric that can withstand the scraping against the road.
She said: 'Both myself and my colleagues are very keen cyclists, but in Sweden a law was brought in that all people must wear helmets.
'A lot of people don't like a bicycle helmet because of the way it looks and what it does to your hairstyle once you have taken it off.
'So despite the law many people carried on not wanting to wear cycle helmets, and this is the same not just in Sweden but in places like the UK too.
The airbag is made of durable nylon fabric that can withstand scraping against the road, the firm claims
'We wanted to make something to keep people safe and at the same time answer these questions for people, keeping them safe but looking good.
'We asked hundreds of cyclists what they wanted from a helmet or a device which could keep them safe.'
The team carried out hundreds of tests using records of cycling collisions across Sweden to form a picture of how the rider moves when they are hit.
The hood is designed so that it inflates within 0.1 seconds so that the airbag is fully inflated before the cyclist can hit their head.
The team tested all typical movements carried out by cyclists when riding in the city or on roads. Even sudden braking and evasive action did not cause the airbag to inflate, they claim.
She said: 'We have also staged all known types of bicycle accidents, and collected the cyclists' movement patterns in these accidents.
The used crash test dummies to see how a person's body reacts during a fatal accident and collected all of the movements in a database.
They then used their own mathematical formula to work out which movements should be key in triggering the device.
A spokesman for RoSPA said: 'It’s good to see innovation, but we would need a lot of evidence about the practicalities and effectiveness of this device.
'For example: given how expensive it is, is it better than a helmet; would it work in all the relevant circumstances; and are there any situations in which it may actually cause injury?'
Apple's latest thinner MacBook Air 11" (L) and 13" models and new operating system at a news conference at Apple headquarters
Apple has unveiled the thinnest, lightest Mac laptop yet which combines features from the iPhone and iPad with traditional series of Macbooks
Steve Jobs announced the new MacBook Air at a press conference last night which will incorporate FaceTime video conferencing and a suite of apps, which Apple is now bringing to all its Macs.
The new laptop has an 11.6-inch screen but weighs as little as 2.3 pounds. At its thinnest it is just 0.11 inches wide while the thickest part is still less than 0.7 inches.
It comes with a multi-touch trackpad which lets users control by pinching, rotating, swiping and double-tapping just like on the iPad or iPhone.
The MacBook Air comes with a trackpad that allows 'pinch to zoom' just like on iPads
The new MacBook Air uses flash storage rather than a hard drive like conventional computers meaning it can power up almost instantly from standby mode and store data twice as quickly as a standard hard drive.
However it has less processing power compared with Apple's other laptops.
Apple will bring a version of its mobile applications store to the Mac, aiming to replicate its success and spur development of new programs.
‘We asked ourselves what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result,’ Jobs said at a media event in Cupertino, California, calling the Air the ‘future of notebooks.’
The MacBook Air comes in two sizes, one with a screen that's 13.3 inches diagonally and another with a 11.6-inch screen. The larger one clocks in at 2.9 pounds and can be used for seven hours, thanks in part to a low-voltage processor from Intel that consumes less power than ones running in standard laptops.
The 11-inch model with a 64GB memory will cost £899 while the 13 inch version with 256 GB of storage comes in at £1,349.
‘They're basically merging the product lines; they're simplifying it,’ said Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu. ‘They're taking the strengths out of what they've learned on the iPhone and iPad and bringing that technology over to the Mac side. It makes a lot of sense.’
While plenty of attention is lavished on the iPhone and iPad, the Mac has been critical to the company's success over past years. Apple sold $22 billion worth of Macs in 2010 comprising one-third of its revenue.
Many experts have wondered whether the iPad would dent sales of the Mac -- as it has done for low-end, Windows-based laptops known as netbooks.
Gartner analyst Mike McGuire said he expects the Air will try to bridge Apple's newer and older product lines.
‘It's that missing link between the tablet future and the existing notebook,’ he said.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the company's latest thinner MacBook Air using his customary 'one more thing' routine
The new MacBook Air is designed to reproduce the versatility of popular devices such as the iPhone and iPad, and will incorporate FaceTime video chats, which Apple is bringing to all its Macs
Jobs also showed off a new version of Mac operating software, which the company will release next summer. Nicknamed ‘Lion,’ it includes an improved ‘iLife’ multimedia suite and incorporates FaceTime video chat, which the company recently launched on the iPhone.
FaceTime will allow for video calls between iPhones, iPod touches and Macs. Over 19 million. It released a test version of FaceTime for the Mac yesterday.
The App Store for the Mac will go live within 90 days, and developers will be able to start submitting apps next month. They will get 70 percent of the revenue from sales.
The original App Store debuted in 2008 and helped spur sales of the iPhone by providing a wealth of fun, useful or merely diverting programs for sale, at the touch of a button.
It houses more than 250,000 apps and has generated over 7 billion downloads. In addition, more than 30,000 apps have been specifically made for the iPad. Nearly 50 million people worldwide use a Mac.
The high-speed Deutshe Bahn ICE3 InterCity Express train at St Pancas International station this morning on its trial run
A 200-mph German bullet train has crossed the Channel and rolled into Britain today from the nation most renowned for making its railways run on time.
The high-speed train from Deutsche Bahn was carrying out a slow-speed 'dry run' trial for a new direct cross-channel link between London's St Pancras station and Frankfurt in Germany, as well as Amsterdam in Holland, within three years.
Experts say the competition could also mean lower fares with a one way trip to Germany costing as little as £39 to £49.
A train guard by the train which Deutsche Bahn wants to prove it can run safely through the Channel Tunnel
The German 'Inter City Express' train bearing the initial letters 'ICE' adorned as a red, white and blue Union Flag, aims to replace passenger jets as the main transport to Germany's financial capital and the Rhineland from 2013.
Three services will run daily, and will also serve Brussels, Cologne and Rotterdam. The German company wants to run services direct between London and the continent three times a day.
Trains would leave London, travel to Brussels and then split. One half of the train would go on to Amsterdam via Rotterdam, with the other half travelling to Frankfurt via Cologne. The trains would be capable of travelling at 200mph.
It is the latest step in the plan to create high speed rail links across Britain and Europe - from Edinburgh to Madrid and Manchester to Marseilles.But while trains will hit 200mph on the Continent, tunnels on the UK side of the Channel mean high speed trains are restricted in many places to 140mph.
Launching the plan at St Pancras, Deutsche Bahn boss Dr Ruediger Grube who travelled with the train through the Channel Tunnel said it marked ' a new era' of train travel adding:'Europe is becoming a small place.
'Every day there are around 50 flights between the Greater London area and the region of Frankfurt and the Rhineland.'
Until now that was out of reach of the railways, he said:'But times change. Thanks to new railway lines, new high speed trains, and new transport policies, we will be able to share in that market.'
The plan is for three trains a day to Leave St Pancras carrying 888 passengers in 16 coaches formed of two coupled trains heading across the Channel. In Brussels, the trains will split, with eight carriages carrying 444 passengers heading to Rotterdam and then Amsterdam.
The other eight carriages will head to Cologne and then Frankfurt. Deutsche Bahn officials said the journey time from Cologne to London would be under four hours - less than the time it takes to get to Berlin, around four and a half hours: 'Passenger can choose which capital they prefer - yours or ours,' said one DB official.
A passenger carriage inside the German train which arrived at St Pancras this morning
Inside the cockpit of the ICE - which is capable of hitting 200mph
The ICE train route from London will slash journey times to Frankfurt
The German challenger arrived less than three weeks after Eurostar unveiled plans for its own 200mph bullet trains to whisk passengers from London to Paris in under two hours - as well as starting its own direct links to Amsterdam.
German railway giant Deutsche Bahn has been busy buying up a number of UK train operators and has now set its sight on taking on the airlines and arch rival Eurostar to win passenger services between the UK and the Continent.
It aims to slash the train travelling time from Central London to Frankfurt, nicknamed 'Bankfurt' in Germany, because it is the nation's major financial centre, from around six hours to five.
It also mean business travellers and tourists can relax for longer in their seats or work via wi-fi rather than enduring the hassle of airline check-in, security and trips to and from the airport.
Mr Grube said:'Three pairs of trains will connect Frankfurt and London via Cologne, Brussels, and Lille, with one train running in each direction in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening.
'This will also be the first time that Amsterdam and Rotterdam have a direct connection with London.'
Rail Minister Theresa Villiers said it was 'great news' adding:'For many people high speed rail is a more convenient alternative to air or road - allowing them to hop on board in the city centre and catch up on some work along the way.'
However the high speed German-built Inter City Express (ICE) trains have first to pass stringent safety tests to pass through the Channel Tunnel - including evacuations.
Their arrival nevertheless highlights how far international relations have moved. Seventy years ago, at the height of the Battle of Britain, the narrow strip of water was all that separated Britain from German invasion. Today the nation which was defeated is now running much of Britain's railways.
The new train is being built by Siemens, the German firm which is also, controversially, building the new second-generation 200-mph Eurostar train - despite massive French anger and threatened legal challenges.
Eurostar launched in 1994 and now carries 9 million passengers a year between London, Paris and Brussels.
Earlier this month Transport Secretary Philip Hammond announced details of the UK's own new bullet trains, with work on the £33billion high-speed project known as High Speed 2 (HS2) set to start in 2015.
It plans to link to the existing London to Folkestone Channel Tunnel link, now known as High Speed 1 (HS1).
The new British bullet trains will run initially to Birmingham before forking off into a 'Y-shaped' route north of Birmingham, with separate legs from the West Midlands to Manchester and the North West and to Leeds and the North East.
Mr Hammond says the proposed new 250mph high speed train service will slash journey times from London to the North by up to an hour. But the London to Birmingham stretch will not be complete until 2026, with lines to the North completed around 2033.
In April Deutsche Bahn - which now employs 27,800 people in the UK - agreed a £1.59billion take-over of UK bus and rail firm Arriva, which includes CrossCountry and Welsh rail services.
It has a 20 per cent strake in London buses, runs the Chiltern Railways route between London and Birmingham Snow Hill, owns the company which runs the Royal Train and recently won the contract to operate the Tyneside Metro in Newcastle and Gateshead.
It also has a 50 per cent shares in the London Overground and Wrexham and Shropshire.
Eurostar passengers pass the ICE high speed train at St Pancras this morning
Breakthrough: The moment when the giant drilling machine smashes through the rock to complete the world's longest tunnel beneath the Swiss Alps
The drilling of the longest railway tunnel in the world has been completed, 14 years after it began.
The last few yards of rock were removed earlier today, opening the 35.4-mile Gotthard Base link through the Swiss Alps which will allow trains to transport goods and passengers to and from Italy - and shave an hour off journey times.
The £624m tunnel through the Gotthard massif, including the 8,200ft Piz Vatgira, is part of a larger project to remove heavy goods vehicles from roads in a bid to preserve Switzerland's pristine Alpine landscape.
Celebration: The tunnel has taken 14 years of digging - 23 years overall - and will not be ready until 2017
Swiss voters, who are paying more than £800 each to fund the project, approved its construction in a series of referendums almost 20 years ago and will have to wait several more before it is ready for rail traffic.
Conservationists say the money was worth spending even if after 23 years of construction it will only take one hour off the length of a journey.
'The Swiss love their mountains,' said Thomas Brolli, a campaigner with the group Alpen-Initiative.
Miners celebrate after the drill 'Sissi' broke through the rock at the final section Faido-Sedrun, at the construction site of the NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel
It claimed a surprise victory in 1994 with a referendum to limit the number of heavy goods trucks allowed to cross the Alps each year to 650,000 - halving the current load - within two years of the tunnel's opening.
'Every Swiss has a link to the Alps, whether they were born there or go there on holiday,' said Brolli.
A graphic from the original plans which shows how the different sections of the mountain were tunnelled through Some 1.2 million trucks currently thunder through Switzerland's mountainous
countryside every year, harming rare plants and animals while adding to the erosion that is the Alps' worst enemy.
With their beloved mountains crumbling, the Swiss decided that instead of simply stopping foreign trucks from passing through the country they would put their tunnel-building expertise to good use by completing a plan first conceived more than 60 years ago.
When it opens for traffic in 2017, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will supplant Japan's 33.5-mile Seikan Tunnel as the world's longest - excluding aqueducts - and allow millions more tons of goods to be transported quickly through the Alps by rail.
A further £8.7bn is being spent on a series of shorter tunnels and high-speed rail links that will ultimately allow high-speed trains from Germany to continue on through to Italy at up to 155 miles an hour, making rail journeys increasingly economically competitive.
For European transport ministers the project represents the first of a series of major rail tunnels meant to take the strain off congested Alpine road links.
The railway tunnel through the Gotthard mountain constitutes the centrepiece of the New Railway Link through the Alps
A second would connect Lyon, France, to Turin in Italy, while a third would largely replace the Brenner road tunnel between Austria and Italy - currently one of the main transport arteries through the Alps.
Those projects are still a long way from completion and could yet be derailed by spending cuts as European governments scramble to fill holes in their budgets rather than drill new ones into the mountains.
Although Switzerland has weathered the financial crisis better than most of its neighbours, cost considerations might have tipped the scales had there not been a strong concern for the future of the mountains.
'I am full of admiration for the Swiss ability to combine a modern advanced economy with pristine Alpine beauty, even when it is expensive to do so,' said Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at Harvard and former Clinton adviser. 'I suspect no other country would have paid for this project.'
According to Brolli, the conservation campaigner, green ideas were inserted at every step of the tunneling process.
Some of the 459 million cubic feet of rock hewn from the mountain - enough to fill 13 Empire State buildings - are being used to restore Alpine lakes that were dredged for gravel.
And warm water, which flows deep under the mountains and can reach 50C, will be used to run fish farms, with one entrepreneur even hoping to provide Switzerland's own source of sustainable caviar.
Almost done: The Gotthard Base Tunnel opened at both ends on Friday, making it the world's longest tunnel at more than 35 miles long
Link: The tunnel will be ready for use in 2017 and will dramatically reduce the level of HGV traffic through the Swiss countryside
First solo glide flight: Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo was released over the Mojave Desert in California yesterday
Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo achieved its first solo glide flight yesterday, under the watchful eye of Sir Richard Branson.
It was the first time the spaceship has flown on its own and the success of the test flight means that the company is one step closer to carrying tourists into space.
Branson called the flight a 'very big deal'. He said: 'There are a number of big deals on the way to getting commercial space travel becoming a reality. This was a very big step.
'We now know that the spaceship glides. We know it can be dropped safely from the mothership and we know it can land safely. That's three big ticks.'
Success: Manned by two pilots, the craft flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership
SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by its mothership to an altitude of 45,000ft and released over the Mojave Desert.
After the separation, SpaceShipTwo, manned by two pilots, flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership. The entire test flight lasted about 25 minutes.
'It flew beautifully,' said Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides.
The six-passenger SpaceShipTwo is undergoing rigorous testing before it can carry tourists to space. In the latest test, SpaceShipTwo did not fire its rocket engine to climb to space.
Until now, SpaceShipTwo has flown attached to the wing of its special jet-powered mothership dubbed WhiteKnightTwo. Sunday was the first time the spaceship flew on its own.
Moment of truth: SpaceShipTwo detaches from the wing of its special jet-powered mothership, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo
SpaceShipTwo will make a series of additional glide flights before rocketing to space.
Sir Richard added: 'The next big step will be the rocket tests actually on the spacecraft itself.
'We've obviously done thousands of rocket tests on the ground, the next big test is in the air. We'll be doing gentle rocket tests in the air, ultimately culminating into taking the spaceship into space.'
SpaceShipTwo, built by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan, is based on a prototype that won a $10million (£6.3million) prize in 2004 for being the first manned private rocket to reach space.
High-flier: The six-passenger SpaceShipTwo is undergoing rigorous testing before it can carry tourists to space.
In the latest test, SpaceShipTwo did not fire its rocket engine to climb to space Tickets to ride aboard SpaceShipTwo cost $200,000 (£125,000). Some 370 customers have paid deposits totalling $50million (£31.3million), according to Virgin Galactic.
Commercial flights will fly out of New Mexico where a spaceport is under construction.
Officials from Virgin Galactic and other dignitaries will gather at the spaceport on October 22 for an event commemorating the finished runway. The event will also feature a flyover by SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo.
Pleased: Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson described the test flight as 'a very big deal'
Mass appeal? An artist's conception of SpaceShipTwo during a sub-orbital flight
How it works: SpaceShipTwo was built by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan
Up and away: An artist's impression of the 500ft Skylifter balloon which would be able to carry heavy loads over hundreds of miles
Invention could see disaster-relief centres dropped into remote areas
Giant balloons that can carry loads over long distances could one day even transport entire buildings.
Australian firm Skylifter is developing a piloted airship that will carry up to 150 tonnes more than 1,200 miles.
They hope that the vehicles could one day carry rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to remote areas.
*** See video of the prototype below ***
Steady as she goes: The airship's design means that it is extremely easy to steer, according to the Australian firm behind it
The airship has been designed as a disc rather than a conventional cigar shape, which the developers say makes it easier to steer and carry heavy loads under different wind conditions.
Measuring 500ft across - the size of a football stadium - it will move using propellers which can be adjusted to change direction while the heavy weight of the load hanging underneath keeps the airship steady.
And the payload it carries will be 700 times that of a heavy cargo helicopter.
One small step: A scaled-down prototype of Skylifter, which its developers hope will one day carry a 150-tonne payload to remote areas
High hopes: The firm plans to launch a full-sized prototype, nearly 150ft wide, within the next three years
Skylifter has already produced a prototype called Betty which is just under 10ft across and can carry just over a pound in weight.
It has also produced a 60ft-wide prototype of the balloon design itself, without an engine.
The firm plans to launch a full-sized prototype, nearly 150ft wide, within the next three years.
Geminoid F in her stage debut in a play in Japan. The android took part in a play alongside a human actress
Geminoid F remained seated on a chair throughout the performance, while she carried out conversations and monologues
American actress Bryerly Long worked alongside the robot in a Japanese play titled Sayonara. She said Geminioid F t lacks 'human presence', making her feel 'alone' on stage
A model (right) touches the face of a humanoid robot called 'Geminoid-F' shaped to resemble her
