When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were "not anywhere close to the norms" that had been established back in the 1980s. Fain knew that physical activity levels and hand-use patterns had changed a lot since then. Jobs had become increasingly automated, the professional and service sectors had grown, all sorts of measures of physical activity (like the likelihood that a child walks to school1) had declined, and the personal computer age had dawned. But to see the numbers decline so steeply and quickly was still a surprise, and not just to her.

They must be doing something." Amos and Danny didn't have much doubt that a lot of people would get the questions they had dreamed up wrong--because Danny and Amos had gotten them, or versions of them, wrong. If they both committed the same mental errors, or were tempted to commit them, they assumed--rightly, as it turned out--that most other people would commit them, too. The questions they had spent the year cooking up were not so much experiments as they were little dramas: Here, look, this is what the uncertain human mind actually does. Their first paper had shown that people faced with a problem that had a statistically correct answer did not think like statisticians.

The recent political earthquakes have found us intellectually and emotionally underprepared, even helpless. None of our usual categories (left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary) and perspectives (class, race, gender) seem able to explain how a compulsive liar and serial groper became the world's most powerful man. Turning away from this unintelligible disaster, many seek enlightenment in literary and philosophical texts from the past, such as Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," George Orwell's "1984," and Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here." It may be more rewarding, however, to turn to Václav Havel: a writer and thinker who intimately experienced totalitarianism of the Orwellian kind, who believed that it had already happened in America, and who also offered a way to resist it. Born in 1936, Havel came of age in Czechoslovakia, whose Communist rulers repeatedly imprisoned and continuously surveilled him while suppressing many of his writings.

Preparations to further examine the inside of the No. 2 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant were halted Thursday by a technical glitch, the plant's manager said. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., better known as Tepco, said it sent a robot with a high-pressure water nozzle into the primary containment vessel, which houses the pressure vessel, but halted the operation after video images from the robot's camera went dark. Tepco said the high radiation might have caused the camera glitch. The camera was designed to withstand 1,000 sieverts of cumulative exposure. Last week, the beleaguered utility said it estimated the radiation in the primary containment vessel to be as high as 530 sieverts per hour, during a similar probe late last month.

The government is to press ahead with plans to enable petty criminals to plead guilty online and receive a sentence through a computer. A report from the Ministry of Justice has called for the system to be tested with non-prisonable offences, such as tram fare evasion, railway fare evasion and possession of an unlicensed road and line. "Under this proposal, defendants who opt in to the online procedure and plead guilty will be offered the option to accept a pre-determined penalty (including the payment of any appropriate compensation and costs), be convicted and pay the amount immediately," it reads. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

MetaBrite, the Seattle startup that has receipt scanning and business intelligence technology, recently raised $3 million from Acorn Ventures and existing investors. According to a report, to date, the startup has raised $16 million in funding. MetaBrite has created machine learning technology that is able to scan receipts and provide item-level details automatically to any retailer. It licenses the technology into a variety of consumer-facing mobile apps, noted the report. "Our application partners cover a wide variety of consumer use cases, including brand loyalty and reward programs, lifestyle apps and mobile consumer research, to name a few," MetaBrite Chief Executive Court Lorenzini said in an interview.

The new iPhone is going to bring with it some of the biggest advancements ever made. But most people won't actually be able to get it. The iPhone 8 – or, as some people are referring to it, the iPhone X – is likely also to be the most expensive ever to go on sale, according to new reports. It's expected to be released by Apple later this year. The phone could cost more than $1,000, according to a new report from Fast Company.

Julian Assange may soon be asked to leave the Ecuadorian embassy. The WikiLeaks boss has been hiding inside the country's London building since summer 2012. But he may be given a month's notice to leave soon, according to Ecuadorian politicians. One presidential candidate, who will fight in the election next week, has promised that he will "cordially ask" Mr Assange to leave if he wins the contest. And the existing government has suggested that it is becoming unhappy with Mr Assange's continuing stay, which is intended as a way of him avoiding extradition to Sweden for questioning about a sexual assault allegation.

Google has announced Android Wear 2.0, the latest version of the company's operating system for wearables. The software brings a number of new features and performance improvements, but one of the most significant is standalone apps. Users will finally be able to search for apps and download them from Google Play directly on a smartwatch, rather than through a smartphone, as long as it's connected to the web via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or LTE. This should dramatically improve the Android Wear experience for iPhone users, who can't access the Play store via iOS. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

A project to build a new rail tunnel in London has turned into an archaeologist's dream. Artefacts dating back thousands of years have been discovered during the construction of the line, known as Crossrail, unearthing layers of the city's history. Now, 500 of the most interesting objects are on display at the Museum of London, including a 16th century bowling ball, ice skates made of animal bones and a Roman pot, which holds cremated remains. "London really is like a layer cake of history of the city from the Roman levels through the medieval, the only modern period into the more recent centuries," Jay Carver, lead archaeologist for Crossrail, told Al Jazeera. The construction of the 42km tunnel, which began eight years ago, is Europe's largest engineering project.