In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori described what he called the "uncanny valley" - a point on a graph relating human affinity for a machine to its likeness of humans themselves, where human affinity plummets as the likeness becomes nearly indistinguishable from ourselves. As robots become more humanlike, our fondness for them increases. But when machines reach a point where they look so much like us that we can barely tell they're different from us, Mori postulated that we'll feel repulsed instead of affectionate. Since we haven't been able to produce robots that are nearly indistinguishable from humans yet, it's somewhat difficult to know whether Mori is correct. However, with a new empathetic humanoid robot, researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK have brought us a step closer to the rim of the uncanny valley.