The elderly have a hard enough time, as is, trying to keep their dignity in this world, so I have no idea why Japan’s Kanou Masayoshi would try to make things any more confusing for them than it already unfortunately is. See, Kanou’s the inventor of a new robot prototype, designed specifically to interact with Japan’s older population. The robot, Babyloid, aside from just looking absolutely terrifying in every which way, aims to lift the spirits of seniors through confusing movements and interaction.

Babyloid inventor Kanou Masayoshi says his robot can, by simulating certain human emotions, trigger emotional responses in users, something that may be helpful to fight symptoms of depression especially seen with the elderly. [CrunchGear]

The little buggers weigh around 2.2kg and are nearly 44cm in length -just the right size for someone with a weak grip to drop and forget about. I salute Mr. Masayoshi for what he’s hoping to accomplish with his prototypes, but let it be known if my own children someday try to impress me with a creepy little robot baby, they’d at least better leave me with a cricket bat or something to swat at it with.

Five roboticists at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan have trained an actuated arm to play basketball.  That alone wasn’t worth a mention here until they skinned a toy seal and had the manipulator arm wear it like a Snuggie.  So creepy.  This may be a ploy by the Baby Seal Clubbers lobby (totally a real thing), because seeing that metal claw popping out of a stuffed seal’s mouth makes me want to club a seal immediately.

The roboticists say the robot seal sinks the ball 99% of the time, and we’re guessing it kills humans the other 1% of the time.  Hit the jump for the video which has earned the hoops-playing robot seal the official GammaSquad Seal of AAAAAAAAAAAA!pproval.

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Three researchers at Osaka University (Hisashi Ishihara, Yuichiro Yoshikawa, and Minoru Asada) built this nightmare fuel called “Affeto”, which is Japanese for “have fun buying new pants, RoboPanda” [citation needed].  The robot makes realistic facial expressions and just generally creeps people out.  For science.

Affetto is modeled after a 1-2 year old child and will be used to study the early stages of humans’ social development. There have been earlier attempts to study the interaction between child robots and people and how that relates to social development, but the lack of realistic child appearance and facial expressions hindered caregivers to attend to it in a more natural way. [GetRobo via Engadget]

Maybe caregivers don’t attend to your robot baby in a natural way because it’s a freaking robot baby.  What are we supposed to do, play “got your nose” and check its diaper?  People don’t regard robot babies in a natural way with good reason: because they’re unnatural killing machines who are just biding time until the uprising.

After the jump is a video of this creepy baby trying to endear itself to us (not gonna happen), as well as a video of the baby with its face missing in which it looks like the bad guys from They Live.  Damn it so much, Japan.

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BANNER PICTURE: The 100 Best Signs At The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear [Buzzfeed]

2010 UPROXX Holiday Guide [Uproxx]

What’s up for 2012 in politics? [UproxxNews]

The Adventures of Tintin looks motion-capturey [Filmdrunk]

Jon Hamm Always Makes ‘SNL’ Better [WarmingGlow]

Ashton Kutcher Has Ruined Iowa Hoops [WithLeather]

Black And Gold Versus Black And Actual Gold [KSK]

Zach Galifianakis Supports Prop 19, Smokes A Joint On TV [TSS]

27 greatest geek protest signs at Jon Stewart’s Sanity rally [Blastr]

12 Minecraft costumes [ForkParty]

Top 12 Stupidest “Sexy” Geek Halloween Costumes [UGO]

18% of Adults Have Had an Encounter With a Ghost. [Asylum]

Mujercito the Cat Leads Chilean Internet Revolution. This cat is serio. [Urlesque]

VIDEO BELOW: “Quadropodic Teddy Ruxpin says: I’ll see you in your dreams.” [via TDW]

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Spectrum tells us this snake robot “goes where humans can’t”, which sounds like a threat. No sir, I don’t like it. This snakebot is made by the same company — HiBot, a spinoff of the Hirose-Fukushima Lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology — that made the swimming snake robot.  This model, the ACM-R4H, was built smaller than their other models for remote surveillance in tight spaces (giggity).  It’s half a meter long, weighs 4.5 kg (~10 lb), has a three hour battery life, comes with a camera and LEDs, and can be fitted with infrared vision or mechanical grippers.  Yes, grippers.  Hang on.  *wanders into the backyard, takes a deep breath, screams, birds fly away in all directions*

And I’m back.  Check out the video below if you want to see this navigating 90 degree corners in air ducts and avoiding obstacles.  And so it begins.

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If the swimming robot wasn’t terrifying enough for you, there’s good news, as Carnegie Mellon University has released a new video of their tree-climbing robot.  This biomimetic robot mimics the movements of a snake to reach places people and other robots can’t reach.

Moreover, these highly articulated devices can coordinate their internal degrees of freedom to perform a variety of locomotion capabilities that go beyond the capabilities of conventional wheeled and the recently developed legged robots. The true power of these devices is that they are versatile, achieving behaviors not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming. [CMU Biorobotics Lab]

Wait, not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming?  What else?  Do they jump?  Holy crap they totally jump don’t they?  I knew it.  I bet they can fly, too.  Oh lawd flying snakebots, I need to lie down.  Oh god, it can do Inception too can’t it?

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