KoreaInstituteOfScienceAndTechnology
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Robot teachers to invade Korean classrooms by 2012
We'd had some indication that robot teachers could be headed to classrooms sooner or later, but it looks like things may now be progressing faster than anyone thought. According to South Korea's etnews, the country has announced plans to invest in a so-called "R-Learning" program that promises to put robotic teaching assistants in up to 400 pre-schools by 2012, and expand to a full 8,000 pre-schools and kindergartens the following year. Those apparently wouldn't be in charge of the class (yet), but they would be used to do things like recite stories, and could let parents check in on the classroom and send messages to their children. If that trial program proves to be successful, the robots could then be expanded to elementary schools, and the Korea Institute of Science & Technology (the folks responsible for the bots) is apparently already eyeing international possibilities.
South Koreans make hydrogen solid for a brighter fuel cell future
While storing hydrogen as a solid by fusing it to titanium isn't an entirely new idea, a team of South Korean scientists look to be the first to find a reliable and efficient method of doing so. The solid-state storage of hydrogen has long been a goal of fuel cell systems, since it does away with those nasty explosive notions of storing hydrogen at a high pressure and low temperature. Apparently the new method being unveiled by the team from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology not only manages to bind hydrogen with titanium into the form of a stable solid that has much less requirements for pressure or temperature regulation, but it takes "absolutely no energy input" to store as such, and "relatively small amounts of energy" to extract. The process still needs further testing, but hopes are high for this discovery to lead toward fuel cell vehicles that are a bit less of a bomb-on-wheels, and more efficient to obtain energy for -- which was the idea all along, right?
