3 Good reasons

To buy an HIV ring

1 It will raise awareness and empathy for the global AIDS problem, hopes its designer, Andriy Kurovets.

2 It can be worn as a “symbol of the possibility of fighting the disease”.

3 It's strangely beautiful.

Robot news

High ambitions

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has handed out millions of dollars for companies to design a plane that can stay aloft for five years unattended.

Low expectations

The Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UK, has won a £1-million (US$2 million) grant to see whether a robot can stir soup safely. The lab will test a robot's abilities to work alongside a person in an enclosed space, such as a kitchen.

Number crunch

£1.9 billion ($3.8 billion) is the estimated worth of unpaid peer review done worldwide, according to a UK report.

8.7% of that is donated by UK researchers, despite the fact that only…

6.6% of journal articles are written in Britain.

On the record

“We're planning on redesigning the bus stop in a 1960s look.”

Sabine Grünwald of the Mühlenau retirement home in Hamburg, Germany, ponders how to improve the fake bus stop they installed outside the facility last year. Patients with dementia who wander off tend to collect at the stop, where they can be collected by staff. A bus never actually comes.

Sources: A. Kurovets, DARPA, Ananova, Times Higher Education, Deutsche Welle