If you’re squeamish about eating sushi then we doubt this is going to help. Chef Robot, on display at the International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition in Tokyo, is really just FANUC’s M-430iA sanitary food and pharmaceutical robot with a fleshy appendage — guess the rest of the human is right there on the serving tray.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed an ultra-dense memory chip that is capable of storing data for up to a billion years (besting silicon chips by roughly… a billion years). Consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle encased within a multiwalled carbon nanotube, the device can be written to and read from using conventional voltages already available in digital electronics today. The research was led by Alex Zettl, who notes that current digital storage methods are capable of storing mass amounts of data, but last just decades, while, say, some books have managed to last nearly a thousand years, though the amount of data they contain is quite small. The new method, called shuttle memory, is based on the iron nanoparticle which can move back and forth within the hollow nanotu . Zettl believes that, while shuttle memory is years away from practical application, it could have a lot of archival applications in the future.

People who may be affected by a class action lawsuit against Google have been receiving some interesting notices in their inboxes lately.  It looks like certain AdWords advertisers are on track to split a $20 million settlement starting September 14th.  The lawsuit stemmed from accusations that Google would sometimes exceed advertisers’ daily budgets.  Google, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed to compensate them with $20 million in a mixture of cash and AdWords credits, and now it’s down to the settlement hearing in September to determine exactly what will happen next.