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Is it just me or does that aircraft look like a … chicken?! o.O
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The Coléoptère was a French experiment from the 1950s which aspired to make a vertical take off and landing aircraft a reality. It looks like something that was an iconic, indelible part of the Atomic Future. The only thing is that it was a complete failure. More »
from Gizmodo
Filed under: Government/Legal, Safety, Videos
If for some reason you still don’t think that texting while driving is a bad idea, here’s a story for you. Aaron Deveau, age 17, was allegedly composing a text message when his car crossed the center line of a Massachusetts street, hitting a car head-on. In that car was Daniel Bowley, Jr. and his girlfriend, Luz Roman. Bowley Jr. suffered massive injuries in the crash, and after spending 18 days in a Boston hospital, died as a result of the injuries.
According to Boston.com, a Haverhill, Massachusetts judge sentenced Deveau to “concurrent sentences of two and a half years on a charge of motor vehicle homicide and two years for a charge of negligent operation of a motor vehicle causing serious injury while texting” earlier this week.
After noting Deveau’s age and lack of any criminal record, the judge later ordered the 17-year-old to serve one year in the Essex County House of Corrections, suspending the other sentences. Deveau was originally arrested in 2011, following the crash that took place in February of that year.
“If I could take it back, I would take it back. I just want to apologize to the family,” Deveau stated during the trial. During his testimony, Deveau reportedly claimed that he was not texting during the time of the crash and could not recall texting while driving.
Luz Roman (pictured above), who survived the crash, spoke out during the hearings, and spoke to Boston.com after the sentencing, which you can see in the video below. “This has been giving me a lot of pain, there are no words to describe,” Roman told Boston.com. Scroll downfor the rest of her commentary, as well as some thoughts from Bowley’s son.
from Autoblog
Filed under: Wagon, Etc., Subaru
“Ja, that ice’ll hold ya.” Until it didn’t, and suddenly a man’s 1996 Legacy wagon was at the bottom of a shallow lake in Finland. Three months later, the Subaru wagon was dragged from its freshwater slumber, and while most people would just write the car off or at most turn it into a parts donor, curiosity got the better of the rescue squad.
Would it run? Just how bad was the damage? Before plunging below the surface, the owner did have time to shut the engine down and get his dogs out, so the boxer four didn’t aspirate any water and electrons weren’t coursing through the various circuits, two details that likely saved a bunch of damage. After removing a live fish from the engine bay, draining a lot of water from the fuel tank and crankcase, and a fresh fill of fluids and spark plugs, lo and behold, the SCUBA-ru chugged to life on the first try.
It’s not perfect; until the residual water works its way through the fuel system it’s going to feel a little low on power, and oxidation may start to fiercely assert itself. The smell is probably epic, too, but this is one funkbox with a great story.
from Autoblog
Researchers from Yale University have discovered a mushroom in the jungles of Ecuador that is able to survive on a diet of polyurethane.
The fungus, namely Pestalotiopsis microspore is able to survive by eating plastic alone and has no need for air or light. The discovery was made by students Jonathan Russell and Pria Anand, who have published their findings in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
The pair has isolated the enzyme within P. microspore that allows it to decompose plastic; the next step will be to extract the enzyme so that it can be put to work dealing with plastic waste. Now all we need is a mushroom that can dine on cesium and we’ll be set.
[Source]
from The UberReview
Among the many lessons the US military learned from the war in Afghanistan (beyond, of course, don’t engage in a land war in Afghanistan) is the need for continuous battlefield surveillance. To help do that work, Boeing developed the Phantom Eye UAV, a drone aircraft that can scout a theater of operations for up to four days at a time without blinking. More »
from Gizmodo
The Next Web is reporting that LinkedIn’s iOS app collects personal data from its calendar—without explicit consent—and sends it back to the company’s servers in plain text. More »
from Gizmodo
Corning’s latest display glass technology, Willow Glass, launched Monday at a trade show in Boston. Willow Glass is glass spun extremely thin and flexible enough to roll into two-inch radius tubes, thanks to a manufacturing process similar to that used to make newsprint.
Corning, the company that makes the Gorilla Glass widely used in smartphone displays, uses roll-to-roll processes to make Willow Glass. The material is processed at temperatures of up to 500º C and rolled out over many cylinders (a rendering of the process is posted on YouTube). The result is a scratch-resistant, bendable sheet that measures 100 microns thick, about the same as a sheet of paper.
Willow Glass performs “exceptionally well” with touch sensors, so it will make a natural pairing with the curved smartphone designs that are all the rage, like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and HTC One X. Corning further notes that the glass could be used in flexible solar cells and lighting. Spinning possible uses out further, we could see the glass used to make e-books into a physical manifestation of their pulpy predecessors—books with glass pages instead of paper ones. In photos, Willow Glass appears pliable enough that it can roll into a two-inch radius, and the PDF fact sheet shows that the 0.1mm thick Willow Glass can bend to a 5cm radius before reaching significant bend stress.
from Ars Technica