April 2, 2012

Good Morning,

Google has put their self-driving Toyota Prius to the ultimate safety test. Check out the first article for the incredible story of a blind man who ran errands in such a car.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Blind man goes for Google car drive

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Google last week posted a video of its self-driving Toyota Prius taking a blind man to a San Jose, Calif., dry cleaners and Taco Bell. "Look, Ma, no hands. No hands, no feet," says Steve Mahan, who has lost 95 percent of his vision. "Where this would change my life is to give me the independence and the flexibility to go to the places I both want to go and need to go when I need to do those things," he said. Mahan is seen chowing down on his taco as the car zips along streets. There was no traffic in evidence. Google said on its Google+ account the drive was pre-programmed, the Los Angeles Times reported. "There's much left to design and test, but we've now safely completed more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, gathering great experiences and an overwhelming number of enthusiastic supporters," Google said in the post. "Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, we wanted to share one of our favorite moments," Google said in the blurb accompanying the 3-minute clip uploaded to YouTube Wednesday.


'Smart' homes seen as future helpers

PULLMAN, Wash. - Now that so many people are comfortable with smartphones, a U.S. researcher says, they should get ready for the next step -- the smart home. Diane Cook, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Washington State University, says homes will soon be "intelligent agents," using sensors and software to anticipate a homeowner's needs and help with tasks around the house. Computer chips are already everywhere in many homes, she said, popping microwave popcorn, recoding television shows on DVRs, and having the coffee hot and ready when the homeowners awaken. "If you have a programmable thermostat, you have the beginnings of a smart home," Cook said in a WSU release Thursday. "What we're trying to do is get the home to take over the job of programming it. "We want your home as a whole to think about what you need and use the components in it to do the right thing," she said. However, she acknowledged, some Americans have privacy concerns over available technologies like smart electricity meters and in-home camera systems. The technologies face a classic challenge of being accepted and adopted, Cook said. "Ultimately, when people get a better understanding of what these technologies do and see a usefulness that counterbalances their skittishness, adoption will start," she said. "I'm guessing some technologies will gain momentum once they're starting to be used."


New image shows billion Milky Way stars

MANCHESTER, England - A picture of the Milky Way galaxy created from thousands of individual telescope images has revealed the details of a billion stars, British astronomers say. The giant picture was stitched together from images taken by two British-developed telescopes at observatories in Chile and Hawaii. The project, known as the Vista Data Flow System, will provide an archive of data to allow astronomers to make new discoveries about the local cosmos, scientists said. "There are about 1 billion stars in there -- this is more than has been in any other image produced by surveys," Nick Cross of the University of Edinburgh told the BBC. "When it was first produced, I played with it for hours; it's just stunning," he said. Cross presented the new work to the U.K. National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester. Ten years in preparation, the image combines data from the U.K. Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with survey data acquired by the Vista telescope in Chile. Researchers from Edinburgh and Cambridge University processed all the data that created the giant image and have made it available to astronomers around the world. "There are many uses for this picture," Cross said. "It will help us really understand the true nature of our galaxy, to see where everything is."


Antarctic ice sheets losing their grip

AUSTIN, Texas - Floating ice shelves in Antarctica are losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially worsening an accelerating loss of ice to the sea, researchers say. Scientist at the University of Texas reported the finding based on analysis of 40 years of satellite imagery of West Antarctica ice sheets. The ice sheet margins, where they hold onto rocky bay walls or slower ice masses, are fracturing and retreating inland where these already-thinning ice shelves will be even less able to hold back grounded ice upstream, the researchers said. "Typically, the leading edge of an ice shelf moves forward steadily over time, retreating episodically when an iceberg calves off, but that is not what happened along the shear margins," researcher Joseph MacGregor said. Calving is when an iceberg breaks off the ice shelf created when a glacier moves off land. "As a glacier goes afloat, becoming an ice shelf, its flow is resisted partly by the margins, which are the bay walls or the seams where two glaciers merge," study co-author Ginny Catania said. "An accelerating glacier can tear away from its margins, creating rifts that negate the margins' resistance to ice flow and causing additional acceleration."

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