In the 1970′s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.\
The interest due was calculated from the year 208 A.D. after a policeman dated the fine back to the year 208 instead of 2008.
“When she opened the envelope with the parking fine, the owner of the vehicle had a dizzy turn and had to be taken to hospital,” the paper said on its website.
The police later acknowledged the error and the woman’s husband stumped up the 102 euros actually due.
Research suggests this preference starts as early as the womb, Nass said. He cites a study in which fetuses were found to react to the sound of their mother’s voice but not to other female voices. The fetuses showed no distinct reaction to their father’s voice, however.
Another answer lies in history. According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women’s voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman’s voice.
However, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has announced that the company wants to increase the distance the autonomous cars can travel truly on their own by three full orders of magnitude to 1,000,000 miles. No timetable was given for the goal, nor was it specified where the miles would be accrued.
The company’s self-driving cars are Toyota Prius models outfitted with cameras, lasers, radar and GPS to help them understand their surroundings and navigate safely. Each car’s sensory information works in conjunction with data stored on Google’s servers, which provides advanced knowledge concerning things like lane counts and configurations, signage, and the location of traffic signals.
The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver has delivered its usual array of outrageous audio gear, but this shockingly priced turntable would have to go pretty high on anyone’s list.
The Onedof One Degree Of Freedom turntable was designed by NASA award winning aerospace engineer Aleks Bakman, and includes some unusual features. The self-centering 50-lb platter uses a liquid suspension to damp resonances, while the platter itself is filled with some kind of damping fluid. Bakman also described its noise canceling vertical motor adjustment, but to be honest the description went over my head.
The Onedof can accommodate three tonearms; pretty good, but not quite the most we’ve seen. At $150,000, I wonder if One-off might be a more appropriate name, or will they find some equally crazy audiophiles to buy some?
In 2007, a Swiss woman in her late 20s had an unusually hard time crossing the U.S. border. Customs agents could not confirm her identity. The woman’s passport picture matched her face just fine, but when the agents scanned her hands, they discovered something shocking: she had no fingerprints.
The woman, it turns out, had an extremely rare condition known as adermatoglyphia. Peter Itin, a dermatologist at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, has dubbed it the “immigration delay disease” because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Yet scientists know very little about what causes the condition.
