Planet Business

Image of the week: Alter images
In our continuing series of updates from the world of cute / creepy robotics, say hello to "Alter", a humanoid robot displayed at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. Looking very much like the "after" in a magazine before-and-after on android weight loss, Alter has been jointly developed by two laboratories studying artificial life, based at Osaka University and the University of Tokyo. He / it shows human-like movements of arms, fingers, the upper torso and its head as well as facial expressions, which is more than can be said for Donald Trump.

In numbers: Let the games begin
$1.6 billion: Estimated cost overrun for the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, which officially open Friday. The games are set to cost $4.6 billion, about 51 per cent more than budgeted. But then all Olympics going back to 1960 have exceeded their original budgets.
85,000: Number of security officers who have been hired to protect the Olympic venues, the athletes' village, the airport and other strategic locations during the Games.
7.5 million: Tickets that went on sale for the 717 sporting sessions. Many of them are still available and going cheap compared to the cost of seeing some action at London 2012.

The lexicon: V2V
Driverless cars, as a weary and sceptical Eamonn Holmes warned Sky News breakfast viewers appear to be a matter of when, not if. Assuming that is correct, it's time to learn some of the lingo, starting with V2V or vehicle-to-vehicle communications. That's when one autonomous vehicle "talks" to another autonomous vehicle, doing the connected vehicle equivalent of an "after you" gesture at crossroads, for example, or pooling information on environmental conditions and the state of the bloody traffic. It is not yet known how exactly the millennia-old phenomenon of road rage will transition to this driverless future, but it's bound to make the leap somehow.

Getting to know: Bert Jansen
Bert Jansen is best known for turning his cat into a drone. It's a simple, everyday story. Orville, the cat, named after one of the Wright brothers, was tragically killed by a car, so Jansen, a Dutch artist, had him taxidermied and then, when he had sufficiently grieved, converted the dead cat into a radio-controlled quadcopter, aka the Orvillecopter. This propeller-assisted innovation took place way back in 2012, and as four years is a long time in the world of drones, Jansen has now further developed his powers of invention: He wants to see humans riding on animals in the sky. "We have a cow at the moment – it's at the tannery right now. It's going to be like a bovine personnel carrier, but airborne," he says. According to the BBC, Jansen has turned rats, sharks and ostriches into flying drones and "even made a badger submarine". He takes requests.

The list: Twitter departures
The revolving door at Twitter's executive suite has been on overdrive of late. Here are just five of notable departures from its payroll in 2016:
1. Natalie Kerris: The latest Twitter exit is the vice-president of communications who joined just six months ago.
2. Katie Jacobs Stanton: Twitter's ex-head of media left in January and is now the marketing chief for Color Genomics, a start-up that makes genetic tests for hereditary health risks. (Susceptibility to social media addiction is not hereditary.)
3. Jana Messerschmidt: The head of business development handed in her notice in May after a whole six years at Twitter, which had made her one of its longest-serving executives.
4. Nathan Hubbard: The one-time Ticketmaster chief executive and former head of commerce, who also took on Stanton's media role after she left, departed in May. He tweeted that he was fed up with the commute from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
5. Kevin Weil: Twitter's former head of engineering, and a frequent public face for the company, was also part of a January exodus of executives. He is now head of product at Facebook-owned Instagram.