Lucky Dragon is a 49-foot aluminum half-boat, half-animatronic beast. It breathes fire. And on the off-chance it battles another Lucky Dragon, it breathes water as well.

But don't be too worried. While that lead shot implies nothing short of full-out robopocalypse, the video pasted below paints a different picture—namely one of a slow, aging Disney ride struggling to cough a few sparks to annihilate the human race through CO2 emissions.

Sorry to spoil the fun. The Lucky Dragon still looks like a wonderful means to celebrate the Aqua Metropolis festival in Osaka, should you be lucky enough to attend. [Mainichi via Pink Tentacle]

This 15-foot-wide, solar-panel-adorned disc is a floating water purifier, to be plopped into the canals in the Japanese city of Osaka, and into the moat around the city's centerpiece castle. Designed by NTT, these "floating UFOs" can filter about 2400 gallons of water in the 6 hours a day they'll be operational, all the while spewing the newly cleaned and oxygenated water out of a little spout in its back, presumably because these things have the potential to be kind of unsettling, and everything with a blowhole is automatically charming. It's true! Check!

At night they'll just sort of float along, creepily. They've got batteries for when the sun hides out, but only to power a rack of glowing LED lights. [Asahi via Pink Tentacle—Second image from Mainichi Daily]

[Gizmodo Japan]

Working up the courage to talk to a woman in a skimpy outfit like one would find in the well-publicized maid cafes can be nerve-wracking for the shyest of the shy. This is perhaps what gave Mother Café boss Asahi Geino his golden egg idea; that Osaka's loneliest otaku crowd would be more comfortable talking to someone that reminded them of their mothers.

So, what do you get at a mom café? According to Geino, "We staff our cafe with women who look older than they actually are, but they're also capable of understanding worries people have and have experience in dealing with people of all ages. Our aim is to become a kind of therapeutic cafe where customers feel at ease enough to be able to open their hearts to staff."

There are 10,000 manga titles to choose from, the opportunity to be hand-fed a slice of cake by a woman that may or may not remind you of your actual mother and if you are a regular; you get some lifestyle-related nagging thrown in for good measure. [Mainichi Shimbun]

A series of cameras, laser range finders and RFID tag readers are scattered around the 1000sqft section of the shopping center. Each of these things help scan humans and determine what one of 10 categories they fall into, one of which is "lost". Once a person is ID'ed, Robovie goes up and provides directions to where they want to go.

You may think this robot is friendly, but just look into its soulless, human-hating mechanical eyes. [Pinktentacle via Robot Watch via Yomiuri via Nikkei]

I'm not afraid of heights, but taking an escalator over thin air in an earthquake-plagued nation certainly caught my attention; it made the "floating" observatory feel safe in comparison.