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The image is copyright Felix Kaestle/Associated Press, and can be found on this Wall Street Journal photoblog page; the caption says it’s “part of the stage setting for the opera ‘Andre Chenier’ by Italian composer Umberto Giordano, which will premiere [at Lake Constance near Bregenz, Austria] in July.“

via What little headline mojo I have has deserted me | Blog | Futurismic

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The Special Ops group of Japan’s Self Defense Forces has asked iRobot for some robotic assistance with the situation at the Fukushima Dai-1 nuclear plant, where several reactors are dangerously unstable after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami led to failures of their cooling systems last week.

Four robots, including iRobot’s Packbot 510 and Warrior 710, left Bedford, Mass., this morning on their way to Japan, along with a team of iRobot employees to provide support, an iRobot spokesperson told me.

The iRobot team will be training Japanese defense personnel, who will control the robots remotely, from a protected vehicle, and iRobot employees will not be getting close to the reactors themselves.

These robots may be able assist at Fukushima Dai-1 in several different ways. The Packbot 510s are equipped with HazMat payloads [photo below], which can detect temperature, gamma radiation, explosive gases and vapors, and toxic chemicals, and feed all of that data back to their controllers in real-time.

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