Norwegian company Wind Catching Systems is developing a floating, multi-turbine technology for wind farms that could generate five times the annual energy of the world's largest, single wind turbine. This increased efficiency is due to an innovative design that reinvents the way wind farms look and perform. Fast Company reports: Unlike traditional wind turbines, which consist of one pole and three gargantuan blades, the so-called Wind Catcher is articulated in a square grid with over 100 small blades. At 1,000 feet high, the system is over three times as tall as an average wind turbine, and it stands on a floating platform that's anchored to the ocean floor. The company is planning to build a prototype next year. If it succeeds, the Wind Catcher could revolutionize the way we harness wind power. The world's first floating wind farm, Hywind, opened in 2017, almost 25 miles off the coast of Aberdeen in Scotland. The wind farm counts six floating wind turbines that are slotted in a buoyant cylinder filled with heavy ballast to make it float vertically. Because they're only tethered to the seabed with thick mooring lines, they can operate in waters more than 3,000 feet deep. Hywind is powering around 36,000 British homes, and it has already broken U.K. records for energy output. Wind Catching Systems launched the same year Hywind opened. It claims that one unit could power up between 80,000 and 100,000 European households. In ideal conditions, where the wind is at its strongest, one wind catcher unit could produce up to 400 gigawatt-hours of energy. By comparison, the largest, most powerful wind turbine on the market right now produces up to 80 gigawatt-hours.

There are several reasons for this substantial difference. First, the Wind Catcher is tallerâ"approaching the height of the Eiffel Tower -- which exposes the rotor blades to higher wind speeds. Second, smaller blades perform better. [Ole Heggheim, CEO of Wind Catching Systems] explains that traditional turbines are 120 feet long and usually max out at a certain wind speed. By comparison, the Wind Catcher's blades are 50 feet long and can perform more rotations per minute, therefore generating more energy. And because the blades are smaller, the whole system is easier to manufacture, build, and maintain. Heggheim says it has a design lifespan of 50 years, which is twice as much as traditional wind turbines, and when some parts need to be replaced (or during annual inspections), an integrated elevator system will offer easy maintenance. "If you have one single turbine and you need to change the blade, you have to stop the whole operation," says Ronny Karlsen, the company's CFO. "We have 126 individual turbines, so if we need to change the blade, we can stop one turbine."

When the system reaches the end of its life, much of it can be recycled. After the first significant wave of wind power in the 1990s, many traditional wind turbines have reached their design lifespan; blades the size of a Boeing 747 wing are piling up in landfills. Not only are the Wind Catcher blades smaller, but they're also made of aluminum, which, unlike the fiberglass used for larger turbines, is entirely recyclable. "You melt it down and produce new ones," says Heggheim. A prototype will likely be built in the North Sea (in Norway or the U.K.). After that, the company is looking at California and Japan.

While vocal app developers accused Apple last week of spinning a lawsuit settlement into an App Store change that was barely a change at all, the company appears to be making a true, if small concession today: Apple says it will let developers of "reader" apps (think Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon's Kindle app) directly link their customers to their own sign-up website, where they could potentially skirt Apple's in-app payment system (and its 30 percent cut) entirely, in those cases where they haven't already. From a report: In a press release, Apple claims that the move will close an investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), and that it'll only apply to those sorts of "reader" apps right now -- a category that was originally designed by Apple to placate companies like Netflix and Hulu by allowing them to let users simply sign into their existing account instead of signing up for a new subscription via the App Store (and having to pay Apple's fees).

The JFTC has confirmed the agreement in a press release of its own, saying that the move by Apple "would eliminate the suspected violation of the Antimonopoly Act." The commission, which has been investigating Apple since 2016, says the company has pledged to report on the status of app review transparency once a year for the next three years. According to the JFTC, Apple proposed changing its app review guidelines in response to the investigation.

"In 2016, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that as much as 78 million tons of solar-panel waste will be generated by 2050," writes a Bloomberg columnist, adding that that's "almost certainly an undercount..." So what will happen to all those used solar panels?

"Across the developing world, homeowners, farmers, and businesses are turning to cheap, secondhand solar to fill power gaps left by governments and utilities," reports Bloomberg. To meet that demand, businesses ranging from individual sellers on Facebook Marketplace to specialized brokerages are getting into the trade. Earlier this month, Marubeni Corp., one of Japan's largest trading houses, announced that it's establishing a blockchain-based market for such panels. Collectively, these businesses will likely play a crucial role in bringing renewable energy to the world's emerging markets — and keeping high-tech waste out of the trash...

They may not be good enough for San Francisco homeowners and cutting-edge utilities, but they work perfectly well for anyone in a sunny climate in need of stable, off-grid power who doesn't want to pay full price. That's potentially a huge market. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of people living without electricity declined from 1.2 billion to 759 million worldwide. Some of that gap was closed by new power lines and other transmission facilities. But most of it was achieved by installing small solar systems designed to power a village, farm or even a single home. As of last year, 420 million people got their electricity from off-grid solar systems. By 2030, according to the World Bank, that number could nearly double.
A staffer at the used solar equipment exchange EnergyBin said they sometimes have 5 million pieces of photovoltaic equipment on their site.

And one broker estimated there were 10 million used solar panels on the global market, saying his own customers included Pakistani farmers pumping water for irrigation and Lebanese hoteliers seeking alternatives to an unreliable local grid.

Futurism reports: Japan's space agency JAXA has announced that is has successfully demonstrated the operation of a "rotary detonation engine" in space, a world's first.

Such an engine uses a series of controlled explosions that travel around a circular channel at its base. The result is a massive amount of thrust coming from a much smaller engine using significantly less fuel — a potential game changer for deep space exploration, according to JAXA. It's a lucrative endeavor and Japan isn't the only country pursuing the idea. Researchers across the U.S. are testing out the technology to make rockets both lighter and more environmentally friendly...

"We will aim to put the technology into practical use in about five years,"Jiro Kasahara, a Nagoya University professor who is working on the technology with JAXA, told the Japan Times last month.
Ars Technica reports that detonation engines should theoretically weigh less than traditional rocket engines &mdash and that JAXA "plans to use data from this test for potential development of detonation engines for kick stages as well as first- and second-stage rocket engines."

Futurism adds that in the same flight JAXA also successfully tested a second "pulse detonation engine."

Western Digital is in advanced talks for a potential $20 billion stock merger with Japanese semiconductor firm Kioxia Holdings, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters: The companies could reach an agreement as early as mid-September, and Western Digital Chief Executive Officer David Goeckeler would run the combined firm, the report said. The news sent Western Digital's shares up as much as 15% in afternoon trading to a market cap of $21.45 billion. Kioxia Holdings, the world's second-largest maker of flash memory chips, last year shelved plans for what would have been Japan's largest initial public offering in 2020. In June, however, financial magazine Diamond said the company was planning an IPO as early as September.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Sam Shead: German technology and engineering group Bosch, which is the world's largest car-parts supplier, believes semiconductor supply chains in the automotive industry are no longer fit for purpose as the global chip shortage rages on. Harald Kroeger, a member of the Bosch management board, told CNBC's Annette Weisbach in an exclusive interview Monday that supply chains have buckled in the last year as demand for chips in everything from cars to PlayStation 5s and electric toothbrushes has surged worldwide. Coinciding with the surge in demand, several key semiconductor manufacturing sites were forced to halt production, Kroeger said.

In February, a winter storm in Texas caused blackouts at NXP Semiconductors, which is a major provider of automotive and mobile phone chips. In March, there was a fire at a semiconductor plant in Japan operated by Renesas, one of the car industry's biggest chip suppliers. In August, factories in Malaysia have been abandoned as national lockdowns were introduced to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Volkswagen and BMW cut their production as they struggled to get the chips they needed to build their cars. These companies and semiconductor suppliers should now be looking to figure out how the chip supply chain can be improved, Kroeger said.

"As a team, we need to sit together and ask, for the future operating system is there a better way to have longer lead times," he said. "I think what we need is more stock on some parts [of the supply chain] because some of those semiconductors need six months to be produced. You cannot run on a system [where] every two weeks you get an order. That doesn't work." Semiconductor supply chain issues have been quietly managed by the automotive in the past but now is a time for change, according to Kroeger, who believes demand is only going to increase with the rise of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. "Every car that gets smarter needs more semiconductors," Kroeger said. Electric cars need very powerful and efficient semiconductors in order to to get more range out of each kilowatt hour of battery, he added. Kroeger said he expects the chip shortage to extend "way into 2022" adding that he hopes demand remains stable. "We need to ramp up supplies so we can fulfill that demand," he said.

"Hackers have drained Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid of $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins," reports Forbes: The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced the compromise and said it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure "cold wallet" storage. The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals... Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million...

Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.

"A new island has been discovered near Iwo Jima," reports long-time Slashdot reader thephydes, "located around 1,200 kilometers [746 miles] south of Tokyo, after a submarine volcano began erupting late last week, the Japan Coast Guard said Monday." Japan Times reports: The new island is C-shaped with a diameter of approximately 1 kilometer [0.6 miles]. It was discovered after the volcano some 50 km south of Iwo Jima, part of the Ogasawara Islands in the Pacific Ocean, started erupting on Friday...

New islands have been confirmed in the area in 1904, 1914 and 1986, with all of them having submerged due to erosion by waves and currents. The one found in 1986 sank after about two months, according to the coast guard.

Nvidia's planned $40 billion takeover of chipmaker Arm should get a longer antitrust probe, British regulators warned after rejecting potential concessions. From a report: In the first reaction on the deal from a major antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement that it was concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much control over semiconductors used in data center services, smart devices and gaming consoles. Lengthy regulatory reviews can add risk to closing a deal that looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months.

Nvidia's move to buy Arm from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. initially raised antitrust concerns from rivals and customers such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google over how Nvidia might control Arm's licenses for essential chip technology. U.K. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden must still decide whether the CMA should open an in-depth probe. Dowden is also separately weighing whether the deal should be blocked over potential risks to national security. The U.K. is leaning toward a veto, according to a person familiar with the matter earlier this month.

Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage. The BBC reports: The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further. Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage. Until now, Toyota had managed to avoid doing the same, with the exception of extending summer shutdowns by a week in France the Czech Republic and Turkey.

New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago. The decision to reduce output now has been precipitated by the resurgence of coronavirus cases across Asia hitting supplies. The company will make some cuts in August at its plants in Japan and elsewhere. The bulk of the cuts -- 360,000 -- will come in September and affect factories in Asia and the US. The aim for Toyota as a whole is to make up for any lost volume by the end of 2021.

Apple censors references to Chinese politicians, dissidents and other topics in its engraving service, a report alleges. The BBC reports: Citizen Lab said it had investigated filters set up for customers who wanted something engraved on a new iPhone, iPad or other Apple device. And Apple had a broad list of censored words, not just in mainland China but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Apple said its systems "ensure local laws and customs are respected." "As with everything at Apple, the process for engraving is led by our values," chief privacy officer Jane Horvath wrote in a letter (PDF) provided to CitizenLab in advance of the publication of its report. And the engraving service tried not to allow trademarked phrases, alongside those that "are vulgar or culturally insensitive, could be construed as inciting violence, or would be considered illegal according to local laws, rules, and regulations."

[CitizenLab's] new report found more than 1,100 filtered keywords, across six different regions, mainly relating to offensive content, such as racist or sexual words. But it alleges the rules are applied inconsistently and are much wider for China. "Within mainland China, we found that Apple censors political content, including broad references to Chinese leadership and China's political system, names of dissidents and independent news organizations, and general terms relating to religions, democracy, and human rights," it says. The report also alleges that censorship "bleeds" into both the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets. It found: 1,045 keywords blocked in mainland China; 542 in Hong Kong; and 397 in Taiwan. In contrast, Japan, Canada and the US had between 170 and 260 filtered words.

Alphabet's Google and Facebook announced their participation in a new subsea cable system for 2024 set to improve internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region. Bloomberg: Dubbed Apricot, the infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia and help serve growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity, Facebook said. In March, the company announced two new transpacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the U.S. west coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company's other digital services. The new fiber-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

Ars Technica reports on a paper investigating how much each power plant contributes to global emissions, using data from 2018. "The study finds that many countries have many power plants that emit carbon dioxide at rates well above either the national or global average.

"Shutting down the worst 5 percent of this list would immediately wipe out about 75 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electricity generation." It should surprise nobody that all the worst offenders are coal plants. But the distribution of the highest polluting plants might include a bit of the unexpected.

For example, despite its reputation as the home of coal, China only has a single plant in the top-10 worst (bottom-10?). In contrast, South Korea has three on the list, and India has two. In general, China doesn't have many plants that stand out as exceptionally bad, in part because so many of its plants were built around the same time, during a giant boom in industrialization. As such, there's not much variance from plant to plant when it comes to efficiency. In contrast, countries like Germany, Indonesia, Russia, and the US all see a lot of variance, so they're likely to have some highly inefficient plants that are outliers.

Put a different way, the authors looked at how much of a country's pollution was produced by the worst 5 percent when all of the country's power plants were ranked by carbon emissions. In China, the worst 5 percent accounted for roughly a quarter of the country's total emissions. In the US, the worst 5 percent of plants produced about 75 percent of the power sector's carbon emissions. South Korea had similar numbers, while Australia, Germany, and Japan all saw their worst 5 percent of plants account for roughly 90 percent of the carbon emissions from their power sector. When it comes to carbon emissions, the worst 5 percent of power plants account for 73 percent of the total power sector emissions globally. That 5 percent also produces over 14 times as much carbon pollution as it would if the plants were merely average...

Simply boosting each plant's efficiency to the average for the country would drop power sector emissions by a quarter and up to 35 percent in countries like Australia and Germany. Switching them to natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide per amount of energy released, would drop global emissions by 30 percent, with many countries (including the US) seeing drops of over 40 percent. Again, because China doesn't see a lot of variance among its plants, these switches would have less of an impact, being in the area of 10 percent drops in emissions. But the big winner is carbon capture and storage. Outfitting the worst of the plants with a capture system that was 85 percent efficient would cut global power sector emissions in half and total global emissions by 20 percent. Countries like Australia and Germany would see their power sector emissions drop by over 75 percent.

Overall, these are massive gains, considering that it's not unreasonable to think that the modifications could be done in less than a decade. And they show the clear value of targeting the easiest wins when it comes to lowering emissions.

The Cabinet Office of Japan is co-hosting an event dedicated to "Society 5.0," a future society the government believes Japan should aspire to. Defined by the Cabinet Office as "a human-centered society [helped] by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space," Society 5.0 is a concept intended to broaden the discussion of innovation from science and technology to all of socioeconomic activity. Nikkei Asia Review reports: The government has also established multiple large-scale programs to encourage companies, involved in everything from health care and mobility to energy, to invest in research and development, not only at the level of pure technology but also to bring it to a pilot level. The exhibition includes some achievements from these programs, including Cyberdyne's HAL, standing for "hybrid assistive limb," which the company claims to be the world's first "wearable cyborg." A HAL exoskeleton autonomously walks on a treadmill at the venue. When worn on a leg, HAL can read faint signals sent to muscles from the brain thanks to electrodes attached to the wearer's skin, determining the wearer's desired movements. "Even if your nerves are not connected at first, they gradually recover through the wearing of HAL, and you can eventually move your own body parts without wearing it," said a person from Cyberdyne.

SkyDrive's "flying car" also attracts the attention of visitors, who can observe a full-scale model of the SD-03, which performed the first successful public manned flights of a flying car in Japan in August 2020. Co-founded by former Toyota Motor engineer Tomohiro Fukuzawa, the startup plans to offer commercial mobility service during Expo 2025, to be held in Osaka. "It is as if we are traveling to the future," said Shinji Inoue, a minister of state who heads science and technology policy, when he visited the exhibition last week. Asked by reporters how to make these cutting-edge tools an everyday reality, Inoue spoke of a need to deregulate the market when it comes to obtaining operating permits for such items. Indeed, the government acknowledges challenges in keeping up with the country's capabilities in implementing scientific progress. Digitalization initiatives, the premise for achieving Society 5.0, "could not sufficiently create new business models through data collaboration, like what we see in other countries," said a report from the Cabinet Office analyzing the previous five-year plan through fiscal 2020. Instead, the initiatives aimed at improving the efficiency of existing operations, failing to drive innovation.

"Fans of Japanese video games couldn't believe their ears as Olympic athletes paraded into Tokyo's National Stadium during the opening ceremony for the 2020 Games on Friday..." reports the Huffington Post. During the Parade of Nations section of the ceremony, "The orchestra was playing tunes from some of their favorite games." In a celebration of Japanese popular culture that is appreciated worldwide, the entry parade was set to tunes from games developed by Sega, Capcom and Square Enix. It kicked off with "Overture: Roto's Theme" from Dragon Quest. Next up was "Victory Fanfare" from Final Fantasy. The parade featured more tunes from Monster Hunter, Soulcaliber and Sonic the Hedgehog. According to Classic FM, the music from Kingdom Hearts was composed by Yoko Shimomura, who is responsible for the music for some of the biggest video games ever made. Fans were delighted to hear her work being incorporated into the ceremony.

While the list didn't feature widely recognized tunes from cultural juggernauts like Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, the music helped give a sense of atmosphere to the ceremony, which was held in almost an empty stadium due to coronavirus restrictions.
There's even an elaborate doodle at Google.com commemorating the Opening Ceremonies with an anime animation that leads to a multi-level 1980s-style videogame in which Lucky the cat competes in various sporting events. (Though the Huffington Post notes that in the real world, about 1,000 people sat in the 68,000-capacity stadium.)

The Washington Post reports the Japanese public "overwhelmingly opposed hosting the Olympics as a new wave of the pandemic hit the country." But unfortunately, host city Tokyo signed a contract agreeing the event could only be cancelled by the International Olympic Committee, and now "There's the possibility — once utterly remote — that Japanese voters could kick Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga out of power in parliamentary elections later this year."

China's capabilities in artificial intelligence are "much closer than I thought" to catching up to the US, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Nikkei Asia, stressing that America would not succeed without a "very strong partnership with our Asian friends." From a report: In an online interview, Schmidt, now chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, said China was closing in on the US in certain areas of AI and quantum computing -- faster than his previous estimate of "a couple of years." That's a really, really big deal," he said. Schmidt stepped down as executive chair of Google parent Alphabet in 2018. He was nominated as the commission chair in 2019 to make AI-related policy recommendations to the US president and Congress.

The commission's final report, released in March, warned that "if the United States does not act, it will probably lose its leadership position in AI to China in the next decade and become more vulnerable to a spectrum of AI-enabled threats from a host of state and non-state actors." To win the tech competition with China, the US had to maintain its lead in "strategic" areas such as AI, semiconductors, energy, quantum computing and synthetic biology, Schmidt said. And for that, he said, "we need much closer relationships with Japanese researchers, Japanese universities, Japanese government -- the same thing for South Koreans and same thing for Europeans."

The U.S. and a coalition of allies on Monday formally attributed the sweeping campaign against Microsoft Exchange email servers to hackers affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security. From a report: The group assessed with "high confidence" that Beijing-linked digital operators carried out the attack that ensnared hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide, a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Sunday. In addition, the partners alleged the ministry -- which oversees the civilian arm of Beijing's intelligence gathering operations -- has utilized contract hackers to conduct other malicious cyber activities around the globe, including a ransomware attack on an American company, and other pursuits to line the pockets of MSS officials.

The use of such hired muscle "was really eye-opening and surprising for us," said the official, who was only authorized to speak anonymously. The coalition includes the U.S., the so-called "Five Eye" nations, Japan, the European Union and NATO. Monday's announcement marks the first time the transatlantic alliance has condemned Chinese digital activities, the official said. The massive Exchange hack was first disclosed in March -- at the same time the Biden administration was dealing with the SolarWinds breach that has since been formally attributed to Russia's foreign intelligence service.

We're in for an information revolution.Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. From a report: The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure. This could literally change everything.

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).

phalse phace shares a report from Reuters: During an analyst call for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's quarterly earnings, TSMC chairman Mark Liu signaled that they are looking into building new factories in the United States and Japan. "TSMC said it will expand production capacity in China and does not rule out the possibility of a 'second phase' expansion at its $12 billion factory in the U.S. state of Arizona." Furthermore, "the CEO on Thursday revealed TSMC is currently conducting 'due diligence' on whether to build a fab in Japan, which would mark a strategically important geographic expansion for the chipmaker. Any Japan fab will be for "specialty technology" -- a term that usually refers to mature node chips that serve specific or niche markets, Liu said, adding that there is no final decision yet."

Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon.

"Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps.

SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.