Blogs / Discoblog

For around the price of a laptop ($1,400), you can protect your grandmother from falling down. Prop, a Japanese based company, has created the perfect present for those elderly relatives: an inflatable airbag, which they displayed at the International Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo. It’s only 2.4 pounds, but it looks like a fanny pack and is currently available in Japan.

The airbag works like this: When a person wearing the bag is about to fall backwards, electronic sensors signal the airbag system to pump 3.9 gallons of gas into each of the two bags, just in time to carefully protect the person from falling on their head and rear end.

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Last week we covered the paper released by the Japanese Whale Research Program (JARPA) showing that minke whales in the Antarctic were getting thinner, and we also covered their research methods—taking measurements from more than 4,500 slaughtered whales. This week National Geographic has an update, interviewing two American researchers who say that killing the whales wasn’t necessary for the research.

Scott Baker, from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, said researchers could have made the same finding by genetic testing, biopsy—removing a small piece of tissue for sampling—or simply through photographic evidence. And Stanford University’s Stephen Palumbi disagreed with the Japanese scientists over the importance of the finding, saying that whales getting a little skinnier might not matter that much, and the study’s findings weren’t statistically significant enough to be useful.

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Japan’s legendary vending machines dispense everything from batteries and hot ramen to alcohol, cigarettes, porn, and panties purportedly worn by school girls. But these instant gratification sin machines aren’t selling their wares ad libitum—well, at least not all of them.

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