According to The Australian Financial Review, Sydney house prices have given up some of their recent strong gains, with prices ticking lower over both the past week and month, figures from CoreLogic RP Data show.
Home values in the NSW capital fell 0.1 per cent last week and are down 0.2 per cent over the past four weeks, the data provider said on Monday. It was the first four-weekly decline in prices since late January and a reverse from the 3.1 per cent monthly gain CoreLogic reported two weeks ago for the month of May.
Prices have fallen over the past four weeks in each of the five largest cities except Melbourne.
The figures partly reflect the results of a quiet Queen's Birthday long weekend that held half as many auctions as a week earlier. Just 1053 auctions were scheduled over the week to Saturday, down from 2008 last week.  Sydney's preliminary clearance rate of 76.3 per cent was based on 337 auctions, compared with 72.9 per cent from 627 a week earlier.
Not everything was slow, however. A newly built five-bedroom home at 6 Willoughby Street, Epping sold at auction for $2.45 million, $150,000 above the $2.3 million reserve price, McGrath Epping agent Wayne Vaughan said. There were eight registered bidders, four of whom cast bids and the final race came down to two people.
"There's a real lack of property on the market in our area," Mr Vaughan said. "Ten of our last properties sold at auction or before auction. The other one sold the following week. That's super strong."
Melbourne's week was slower, with a clearance rate of 66.9 per cent based on 275 auctions, down from a 71.1 per cent clearance rate last week based on 894 auctions. The Victorian capital is the only city to have recorded a gain in dwelling values over the past week and past month, with a 0.1 per cent rise in both.
In Brisbane, where Queensland was not slowed by a public holiday, the preliminary auction clearance rate was 46.5 per cent, based on the results of 101 auctions. This is slightly below the 48.2 per cent rate a week earlier on 110 auctions. Home values fell 0.5 per cent over the week, bringing the overall decline over the past four weeks to 0.8 per cent.

http://www.afr.com/real-estate/residential/nsw/sydney-house-prices-falling-back-over-the-month-corelogic-says-20160613-gphocd
 
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According to The Asahi Shimbun, not content with just fluffing his pillow to find the perfect slumber, Koichiro Zamma tried out the sleeping arrangements for chimpanzees at the top of a tree in an African forest.
The 43-year-old research fellow with Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies believed the primates would know what kind of bed ensures the soundest sleep.
From that inspiration, the “humankind evolution bed” was developed, and it is now on display at the Kyoto University Museum in Sakyo Ward as part of an exhibition themed on “sleep.”
Chimpanzees migrate in quest of food. When they arrive at a favourable destination, they stack folded tree branches on top of trees to build a bed, with a depression in the centre, to sleep in.
Zamma, a primatologist, said the chimp bedding enveloped his body in a natural shape and rocked him to just the right extent.
“It was the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in in my life,” Zamma said.
Zamma teamed up with Shinichi Ishikawa, a 46-year-old environment designer, and Iwata Co., a Kyoto-based bedding manufacturer, to develop the perfect bed for humans starting in May last year.
Their prototype bed has an oval shape that is 1.6 meters long and 1.2 meters wide. The bottom part, woven with paper string, is designed to ensure high breathability. It is covered by a mattress that is thicker around the periphery to replicate a shape with a depression in the centre.
The legs, which stretch out in eight directions, were designed with curves so that the bed could rock like a cradle.
Zamma said he and his co-workers will further pursue the development process for the eventual goal of commercialization.
Ape-men, the remote forebears of humankind, are also believed to have slept in treetop beds.
“The human body may retain memories from that time,” said Kyoto University President Juichi Yamagiwa, an authority of gorilla studies, who tried out the prototype bed.

Ref: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606130009.html

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According to The Asahi Shimbun, with the seemingly unhygienic tag line “Get sweat on your side,” Shiseido Co. said it has produced sunscreen that uses the perceived enemy of such products to increase protection from ultraviolet rays.
The additions to Shiseido’s Anessa range of products are part of cosmetics makers’ high-tech efforts to cater to the growing and evolving market for sunscreens.
Safer products for children and protection-enhanced sunscreen for sports-minded people are now on sale.
Sunscreen shipments in Japan reached about 50 billion yen (US$467 million) in 2015, almost double the amount 10 years ago, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
One long-held complaint about sunscreen is that the products drip away with or are at least diluted by sweat.
Shiseido said its three new products should erase such fears about perspiration and water by “reversing” the effect.
Perspiration spreads the products’ protective ingredients evenly, increasing the UV-protective effect by 20 percent, according to the company.
“We applied the technology used in hairstyling products that secure one’s hairstyle even when sweating,” said a Shiseido official in charge of sunscreen development.
One of Shiseido’s new products is ANESSA Perfect UV Sunscreen Aqua Booster, which has a suggested retail price of 3,240 yen (US$30.28), including tax, for a 60-milliliter bottle.
Kose Corp. is now selling Sports Beauty UVWEAR Super Hard under the Sports Beauty sunscreen brand. The product’s sun-block layer covers the skin in accordance with body movements during vigorous exercise, and it maintains a level of protection from UV rays even after sweating, according to the company.
The 50-milliliter version of Sports Beauty UVWEAR Super Hard has a suggested retail price of 2,160 yen, including tax.
Sunscreen makers are targeting another active group--children.
According to Kao Corp., the percentage of households with children of elementary school age or younger that use sunscreen daily on the kids rose to 21 percent in 2014 from 13 percent in 2007.
“As the sunscreen market for women has leveled off, we have expanded out target to children who are often exposed to UV rays while playing outside or in other situations,” a Kao official said.
Kao has started offering Biore Sarasara UV Nobinobi Kids Milk sunscreen, which uses a new technology that encases UV absorbing agents in small capsules. That prevents the agents from coming in direct contact with the children’s skin.
The product comes in 90-gram bottles and costs an estimated 800 yen, including tax.

Ref: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606120016.html

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According to The Australian Financial Review recently, innovative web-based grocers are stealing a march on the major supermarket chains as inspiration rather than convenience underpins a new phase of growth in the $1.8 billion online grocery market.
Keith Louie, the chief executive of Aussie Farmers Direct, says busy consumers are increasingly seeking the convenience of home-delivered groceries and a solution to the daily quandary of what to cook for dinner.
The meal solutions category is now growing by more than 20 per cent a year and demand has spawned a raft of start-up food delivery businesses from HelloFresh, My Food Bag, Marley Spoon and Thomas Farms Kitchen, which deliver "meal kits" (fresh ingredients with matching recipes) to Dish'd and Gourmet Dinner Service, which supply chilled gourmet prepared meals.
Aussie Farmers Direct, which started out 11 years ago with home deliveries of milk, bread and eggs,and  entered the meal solutions market last month, teaming up with Weight Watchers to deliver boxes of fresh food products and recipes using Weight Watchers' points system.
Mr Louie said the Weight Watchers boxes were popular with Weight Watchers members and people who wanted to prepare healthier meals.
"Sales have grown more rapidly than we forecast; we are selling thousands of boxes a week," he said.
Mr Louie believes the meal solutions market could be worth "hundreds of millions" of dollars over the next three to four years, helping to lift online grocery sales from about 2 per cent of the total market to around 4 or 5 per cent.
While Coles and Woolworths dominate the $90 billion grocery sector, accounting for around 75 per cent of supermarket sales, their share of the $1.8 billion online grocery market is estimated to be worth between 50 and 60 per cent.
The major chains compete online on price, range and distribution, with capacity to reach more than 90 per cent of Australian households and offer convenient click and collect options.
However, industry players say Coles and Woolworths are struggling to match smaller online food companies in providing innovative value-added services such as portion-controlled recipes and meal solutions.
Tom Rutledge, a former MasterChef contestant who runs online meal kit delivery company HelloFresh, one of seven brands owned by German web retailing incubator Rocket Internet, says the biggest problem for consumers buying groceries online is the number of decisions that have to be made.
"Meal kit services offer mental and physical convenience: you don't have to make those decisions," he said, adding that the typical HelloFresh box has just 26 items.
Aussie Farmers and HelloFresh believe the meal solutions market will eventually consolidate and only those providers with strong supply chains, economies of scale and loyal customers will survive.
"Here at Aussie Farmers we feel we have an advantage in that we have been established 10 years, we have significant fresh product volumes in each  state and we are well configured to support a meal solutions approach," Mr Louie said.
Aussie Farmers now has annual sales of more than $100 million, more than 100,000 active customers in five mainland capital cities and several regional centres, a network of about 150 franchisee drivers, who deliver groceries once or twice weekly, and more than 100 suppliers.

Ref: http://www.afr.com/business/retail/the-online-grocers-solving-the-dinner-dilemma-20160524-gp2noq
 
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According to The Asahi Shimbun, Japanese scientists have unwrapped their crystal balls (more likely microscopes) and predicted what type of flu-virus mutations are likely next year.
The new technology means they have more chance of coming up with a better vaccine to fit the type of influenza.
What type of flu virus should be used to create the seasonal flu vaccine for the year is predicted by researchers and then recommended by the World Health Organization.
When the virus used for the vaccine is different from the one that prevails that year, the counteragent fails to prevent a flu epidemic.
The scientists that made the key breakthrough were primarily from the University of Tokyo.
The team--led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virus professor at the university’s Institute of Medical Science--developed a new method to predict what type of flu will likely be prevalent based on possible virus mutations.
The researchers first artificially created various flu viruses and conducted experiments to find out which virus is more likely to become prevalent among humans. Then they looked for influenza viruses in the natural world that are similar to the artificial one that they confirmed is most likely to prevail.
If viruses with similar characteristics are found, that means few people have antibodies against such a flu virus and therefore that type will likely become prevalent in the future.
The team surveyed a type A virus, known as Hong Kong flu, which prevailed in 2014 and 2015, and discovered the new technology can predict mutations in that type of influenza.
Flu viruses frequently undergo mutations and there are variations even in influenza type A and B viruses.
The findings were published in the online edition of the British scientific journal Nature Microbiology on May 23 2016.

Ref: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606090010.html

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According to The Australian Financial Review recently, strong auctions and new apartment sales in Sydney and Melbourne have reaffirmed the continued strength of the housing market.
Following Corelogic RP Data's release of stronger May house prices last Tuesday, Sydney achieved a 76.7 per cent auction clearance rate, compared with 73.2 per cent the previous week, while Melbourne cleared a flat 71.4 per cent.
Both Sydney and Melbourne have been hovering around 70 per cent since February, Corelogic's Kevin Brogan said but stock levels were fuelling the higher prices.
There were 1953 auctions held over the week, down from 2480 previously.
The Corelogic price index for May shows a rise in house prices in May – particularly in Sydney at 3.1 per cent – has pushed house prices back up into a double-digit price growth of 10 per cent for the year to May 2016 after slowing to 7.4 per cent in December last year.
Lower interest rates, a pre-election rush and low stock motivated the numbers, property experts said.
"But there is no new boom [in Sydney] … and it is not like what we had last year when the market was in an absolute frenzy," property research SQM Research's managing director Louis Christopher said.
Mr Christopher held on to his prediction of no more than 9 per cent growth for Sydney house prices, and 13 per cent for Melbourne by the end of the year.
New home buyers and downsizers were busy on the weekend, flocking to off-the-plan sales in Sydney and Brisbane.
Both Brisbane and Adelaide's clearance rates also improved, up at 55 per cent and 67 per cent respectively, from 42 per cent and 53 per cent in the previous week.

Ref: http://www.afr.com/real-estate/strong-housing-market-hold-ground-again-20160605-gpbw1l
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According to The Nikkei Asian Review today, JFE Steel will standardize the core operating system for all of its Japanese facilities, tapping "internet of things" technologies to improve the company's response to market fluctuations.
The JFE Holdings unit will spend some 70 billion yen (US$652 million) by fiscal 2022 to consolidate the computer systems, which currently differ from location to location, in the company's biggest such revamp since its founding in 2003 via the business integration between NKK and Kawasaki Steel.
A single database will help manage information from multiple plants to shorten production times and improve quality using big-data analytics. Four steel mills in Chiba, Kanagawa, Okayama and Hiroshima prefectures as well as a steel pipe plant in Aichi Prefecture will be managed together.
The systems traditionally have been developed and revised separately for each plant. Varying terminology and procedures have made it even more difficult to coordinate among the sites.
But the unified management of order and production data will create benefits, such as letting engineers at headquarters or the Kanagawa site detect early signs of equipment failure in Hiroshima. Successful process improvements in one steel mill can be enacted immediately in other sites, too. Production costs could drop by as much as 10% for some items.
The integrated system also will enhance the flexibility to respond to supply-demand changes. Sales staff will see when a specific product is to be made at a given site. Order delivery times are to be reduced by up to 30%.
Giant steelmakers have analyzed sensor-collected data since the 1980s to improve quality and productivity. But limits in data processing and transmission technologies have made it difficult to coordinate operations across multiple sites. JFE now sees an opportunity to tap advanced technologies in these areas to boost efficiency further.
Automotive, chemical and other industries that operate large facilities are likely to take similar steps.

Ref: http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/JFE-Steel-to-synchronize-mills-via-internet-of-things

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According to The Nikkei Asian Review today, Kubota will work with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone to develop cutting-edge agricultural technology, including autonomous equipment, in an effort to support a graying Japanese agricultural sector while lifting sales in such regions as Southeast Asia.
The two Japanese companies will announce the partnership as early as this week. They will set up a new IT service for farmers, which they plan to use to help put self-driving farm equipment on the market, targeting a 2018 rollout.
Kubota has commercialized systems that use such data as the flavour and water content of rice harvested from individual paddies to automatically adjust fertilizer application the following year. NTT will supply accurate GPS technology as well as systems using artificial intelligence to forecast weather and harvest times.
The new service will use sensors positioned around farmland to measure temperature and water levels. This data, along with crop pictures taken by drones, will be used to perform a detailed analysis of growth. After taking climate and crop types into account, the system will determine when to fertilize and harvest each paddy, then send the appropriate directions to equipment over the internet. Customers will also be able to use drones to apply agrochemicals to just disease-affected areas.
The Japanese agricultural sector faces an aging problem and a severe labour shortage. The average age of farmers reached 66.4 in 2015, up more than three years from a decade earlier, shows data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Incorporating information technology into farm machinery will let even young, inexperienced operators perform farm work easily.
And if the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is ratified, exports of agricultural products could pick up. NTT's worldwide network of internet service bases will let Kubota supply autonomous equipment in such regions as Southeast Asia, where rice is a major crop.
Kubota ranks fourth in the global agricultural equipment market, with annual sales of around 1 trillion yen (US$9.38 billion). Getting a leg up on rivals with advanced technology using big-data analysis would help the company market to large agribusinesses in Europe and the U.S.

Ref: http://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Kubota-NTT-to-partner-on-self-driving-farm-machinery
 
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According to The Australian Financial Review, the mining industry's relentless productivity push has been unleashed. More of the world's biggest mining companies are throwing their doors open to help find innovative solutions to operational challenges and senior industry executives warn without such a bold approach the industry's "innovation ecosystem" at risk.
Technology will transform the industry's level of transparency with communities, the value of ore bodies, the role of exploration and the way operations are conducted on site, especially as automation and data analytics advance.
Many of the chief executives surveyed recognised innovation was not often seen as central to their strategy, primarily due to 'risk exhaustion' where "further innovation risk was seen as too much".
"To change this, investor perspectives of mining need to shift from innovation being associated with risk to a lack of innovation being associated with risk to sustainable returns," the report said.
Whether it is in partnership with suppliers, universities or innovative individuals, some of the world's largest mining companies are increasingly using external ideas as well as internal ideas to address problems, a trend known as "open innovation".
As well as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Gold Fields and AngloGold Ashanti have sourced solutions from outside their businesses.
And it is not unique to mining. Broadspectrum chairman Diane Smith-Gander said collaboration between large and small companies, across most industries, needed to improve quickly.
"There is definitely a conjuncture of interests between the start-up and the large corporation, there are definitely skills here to do it, there are lots of examples [and] so it really is just about getting on with it very fast."
BHP Billiton vice president technology Alan Bye says the global major's recent participation in a 'hackathon' and online problem-solving competition through Unearthed, a Perth-based resources-focused innovation program, had delivered a swathe of prototype solutions for five challenges within its iron ore business it was now assessing for implementation or further development.
"When you bring fresh thinking and highly motivated people on to a problem you get some amazing outcomes," Mr Bye said.
However, he agreed implementing the solutions was challenging because "most big mining companies' procurement systems are geared towards big commercial businesses and not towards start-ups" adding it was important for the building momentum of collaboration within the industry to continue otherwise the initiative "will die for lack of support and interest".
Rio Tinto iron ore chief executive Andrew Harding agreed and said "The more people involved in an effort, particularly when it is around ideas and coming up with new ideas that actually work and make people money, the more likely the economy or the industry itself will actually benefit from it."

Ref: http://www.afr.com/business/mining/here-come-the-mining-giants-and-they-want-to-work-with-you-20160603-gpapi2

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According to The Nikkei Asian Review today, competition for skilled software developers has been intensifying among automakers as they move further into the realms of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and driver assistance technology.
Toyota Motor is close to a deal to acquire two robot makers from Google's parent company Alphabet, sources said on Wednesday. The two companies are Boston Dynamics of the U.S. and Schaft, a venture set up by a graduate of the University of Tokyo. The Japanese automaker plans to make the purchase through Toyota Research Institute, a unit established in Silicon Valley in January to develop artificial intelligence. Toyota is expected to use part of TRI's US$1 billion five-year research and development budget to finance the acquisition.
Boston Dynamics has been developing advanced biped and quadruped robots with financial help from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, under the U.S. Department of Defense. Regarding Schaft, a software analyst said its strength lies in developing software for controlling two-legged robots.
Toyota is expected to welcome some 300 employees from the two companies, hoping they can help the carmaker develop robots for use in everyday life. Toyota sees these types of robots as a key driver of its future growth. It also intends to adopt the robot makers' engineering successes to improve its autonomous driving technology.
"Objectively speaking, Google is ahead [of us] in artificial intelligence," a Toyota representative said. "We need to work faster and harder in order to be competitive."
Toyota has welcomed Gill Pratt, a former DARPA member to lead TRI. It hopes the research unit, nestled in the world's premier cluster of software engineers, helps it revamp its robotics unit.
TRI has been actively luring engineers from American information technology companies, including Google, and from research institutes. It is also rapidly buying up companies primarily to acquire talent rather than assets or product lines.
This kind of acquiring is also heating up in Japan. A software analyst at a public university in Greater Tokyo has been contacted by Tesla Motors, an American electric vehicle start-up, and Toyota.

Ref: http://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Toyota-peers-desperate-for-coding-talent

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