Google's self-driving cars might be too good at braking for cyclists

Google's self-driving cars are cautious by design, but in at least one instance, it may be a bit too much. A cyclist posting on a road bike forum says that an encounter between themself and a self-driving car ended up with neither moving more than a few inches for a good two minutes. The cyclist apparently came to a stop at a four-way intersection moments after a Google car did, but the cyclist remained standing on their bike. As the car began to move forward, the cyclist also rolled forward slightly, causing the car to come to a halt. While trying to maintain balance on the bike, this back and forth keep going:
"I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one."
"We repeated this little dance for about two full minutes, and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection," the cyclist writes. "The two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to 'teach' the car something about how to deal with the situation."
Though it's obviously not the right behavior for a self-driving car, that's not a bad outcome for the encounter. Drivers often aren't very courteous of cyclists, but a well-made autonomous vehicle would have no option but to be careful and respectful. "The odd thing," the cyclist writes, is that "I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one." Google may still have a lot of work to do, but that's the outcome it's looking for.

The encounter is said to have occurred in Austin, where Google very recently began a new set of self-driving car tests on public roads. In fact, it's encounters like this one that Google was looking for when it started up there. "From pedicabs to pickup trucks, Austin's streets will give our self-driving car some new learning experiences," Google said at the time. It's not surprising to hear that Google's cars continue to be cautious in their encounters with basically anything else on the road. Google recently started to report accidents that its cars have been in, and so far, Google says, every accident was the fault of another vehicle's human driverالمصدر===THE VERGE

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Unique Jewelry That Features Remarkably Tiny Skulls and Faces Carved Into Pearls and Other Found Objects

Japanese jewelry artist Shinji Nakaba has crafted a wonderful line of wearable sculptures that features remarkably tiny skulls and faces carved into tiny pearls and other found objects. According to Nakaba, no material is more valuable than another.

(translated) I am making jewelry from recognition as “wearable sculpture” I use not only precious metals and stones but also something usual,such as aluminum Beer can or plastic bottle,or even some discarded materials.
I’m dealing all the materials equally no matter how precious or not precious they are.

Items can be purchased through Nakaba’s online store.









images via Shinji Nakaba
via Magnifico, Bored Panda

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Bas-Relief 'Hobo Nickel' Sculptures Carved into Coins by Paolo Curcio

Artist Paolo Curcio craves tiny bas-relief sculptures into coins---a traditional art form known as the hobo nickel. Curcio's coins feature intricately detailed hobos, skulls and a variety of pop culture characters. Plastic castings of his works are available online. Here's our previous post on Skull Nickels. photos via Paolo Curcio…

December 27, 2013

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Beautiful Handmade Resin Jewelry Containing Real Flowers, Seashells, and Other Natural Objects

Oregon-based jewelry designer ModernFlowerChild handcrafts gorgeous clear resin jewelry that contains real flowers, seashells, leaves, and other organic materials. The jewelry is available in a variety of forms, including bracelets, rings, and earrings. ModernFlowerChild sells her work on Etsy. Her jewelry is also available at Faerie Magazine. And more photos…

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Incredibly Tiny Sculptures Carved in Pencil Graphite

In his spare time, Turkey-based engineering student Recep Alçamli carves incredibly tiny yet remarkably detailed sculptures in the graphite of pencils. He has more sculptures posted on his Facebook photostream. We previously posted about similar pencil graphite sculptures by Dalton Ghetti. photos via Recep Alçamli via Bored Panda

October 8, 2014

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Other Links From Around The Web

Contributing Editor at Laughing Squid - @HRLori

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Israeli Artist Demonstrates How to Create a Realistic Siberian Husky Face With Makeup

Ilana Kolihanov, an extremely talented makeup artist in Israel, demonstrates how to create a realistic Siberian Husky face, using her own dog as a template.

Ilana has also offered tutorials on creating amazing tiger faces, alien faces, skulls along with everyday makeup tips. The commentary is in Hebrew, but the Ilana makes the videos easy to follow along with her deliberate brush strokes.source==========

images via Ilana Makeup Artist

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+18+Don't watch this realistic Mortal Kombat fatalities video during lunchtime

Oh … oh my. Oh my word. The Mortal Kombat series - and Mortal Kombat X in particular - features some pretty graphic violence with over-the-top X-Ray attacks and vicious fatalities, but there's a reason these things should exist only in video game land; seeing them in real life is enough to make you more than a little queasy. Still, if you think you've got the stomach for it, YouTube channel RackaRacka has crafted a video showing what some realistic fatalities would look like:

Props to the filmmakers for their great special and practical effects, as well as camera work that perfectly captures the brutality of Mortal Kombat. The humor throughout ("I'll fatality you bro!") and creativity in their kills was also admirable. Personally, I quite enjoyed the "man gets beat to death with his own entrails." Anyway, enjoy your lunch!
Oh … oh my. Oh my word. The Mortal Kombat series - and Mortal Kombat X in particular - features some pretty graphic violence with over-the-top X-Ray attacks and vicious fatalities, but there's a reason these things should exist only in video game land; seeing them in real life is enough to make you more than a little queasy. Still, if you think you've got the stomach for it, YouTube channel RackaRacka has crafted a video showing what some realistic fatalities would look like: Props to the filmmakers for their great special and practical effects, as well as camera work that perfectly captures the brutality of Mortal Kombat. The humor throughout ("I'll fatality you bro!") and creativity in their kills was also admirable. Personally, I quite enjoyed the "man gets beat to death with his own entrails." Anyway, enjoy your lunch!Source==games===

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We asked Cortana some Halo questions - can you guess the answers?

If you've upgraded to Windows 10 of late, you'll have gained easy access to Cortana, a voice-activated personal assistant who bears a striking audio resemblance to Master Chief's see-through secretary/guidance councillor/probable love interest. That point's proven when you ask her Halo-themed questions - she's got a surprising repository of trivial/sassy responses to questions about the franchise she sprang from.

I've put together 15 of my favourite questions and answers to pose to my new trapped AI - but there's a twist. You have to guess which are the real responses, and which are dumb things I made up because I'd really like a job writing dialogue for text-to-speech robots.
Oh, and if you've found any particularly good secret questions I didn't ask, leave a comment - I want to bug her some more.Source==games  Radar+====

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The best web browser of 2015: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, IE, and Opera compared

We put the screws to all five modern browsers, testing them in all manner of scenarios. If you're looking for a fast, efficient, convenient browser, we've found two that we think you'll like.

The best browsers go beyond benchmarks, racing through real-world webpages as well as canned routines. They’re easy to set up, flexible and extensible, and connect other devices and services into an ecosystem. 
Look, throwing a few benchmarks at a browser just doesn’t cut it any more. Just as you expect us to test graphics cards against the latest games, we think your browsers should be tested against a collection of live sites. Can they handle dozens of tabs at once? Or do they shudder, struggle, and crash, chewing through your PC’s processor and memory? 
To pick a winner, we put Google Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera to the test, barring Apple’s abandoned Safari for Windows. We used the latest available version of each browser, except for Firefox, which upgraded to Firefox 40 late in our testing. And we also tried to look at each browser holistically: How easy was each to install and set up? Does Opera make it simple to switch from Chrome, for example?

For 2015, we have a newcomer: Microsoft’s Edge browser, which has been integrated into Windows 10.

You’ve already seen part of our tests, where we showed you how much of an impact enabling Adobe Flash can have on your system. Disabling or refusing to load Flash can seriously improve performance—some sites, like YouTube, have begun to transition to less CPU-intensive HTML5 streams. Still, other readers pointed out that they simply need to run Flash on their favorite sites. That’s fine—we tested with and without Flash, so you’ll have a sense for which browser performs best, in either case.
Oh, and Microsoft: We found that your new Edge browser isn’t quite as fast as you make it out to be. (Sorry!) But it still demonstrated definite improvement over Internet Explorer.

The benchmark numbers favor Chrome and Firefox

We do consider benchmarks to be a valuable indicator of performance, just not a wholly defining one. Still, they’re the numbers that users want to see, so we’ll oblige. We used a Lenovo Yoga 12 notebook with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-5600U inside, running a 64-bit copy of Windows 10 Pro on 8GB of memory as our test bed.
We tested Chrome 44, Windows 10’s Edge 12, Firefox 39, Internet Explorer 11, and Opera 31 against two popular (though unsupported) benchmarks—Sunspider 1.0.2 and Peacekeeper—just for reference purposes. But we’d encourage you to pay attention to the more modern benchmarks, including Jet Stream,  Octane 2.0, Speedometer, and WebXPRT. The latter two are especially useful, as they try to mirror actual interaction with web apps. We also tested using Oort Online’s graphics benchmark as well as the standardized HTML5test—which is not so much a benchmark, but an evaluation of how compatible a browser is with the HTML5 standard for Web development.
From our testing, Chrome and Firefox topped the Speedometer and WebXPRT tests, respectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google was the fastest browser under the Google-authored Octane 2.0 benchmark. But Microsoft’s Edge led the pack in the Jet Stream benchmark—which includes the Sunspider tests, which Edge led as well. (For all of the benchmarks, a higher number is better; the one exception is Sunspider, which records its score in the time it took to run.)

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox do well here. (A higher result is better, except for the Sunspider benchmark.)

What’s surprising about Edge is that it led the pack in the Jet Stream benchmark, but fell way behind on Speedometer, only to record a quite reasonable score in WebXPRT. (Microsoft claims that Edge is faster than Chrome in the Google-authored Octane 2.0 benchmark as well, but our results don’t indicate that.)
Chrome flopped on the Sunspider test; the only test Firefox failed equally miserably in was the Oort Online benchmark, which draws a Minecraft-like landscape using the browser.

For whatever reason, I noticed some graphical glitches as Edge rendered the Oort landscape, including problems drawing a shadow that slid across the bay in the night scene. But Oort proved even more problematic for Firefox, rendering “snow” as flashing lights and rain as a series of lines. (We’ve included the test result, but take it with a grain of salt.) Internet Explorer 11 simply couldn’t run the Oort benchmark at all.
We also included the HTML5test compatibility test, which measures how compatible each browser is with the latest HTML5 Web standards. Although some developers focus extensively on each browser’s score, even the test developer isn’t too concerned:
 And the only one that fails that test, of course, is the semi-retired Internet Explorer 11.
What does all this mean? It doesn’t indicate a clear win for any specific browser, including Chrome. Based on our benchmark tests, many of the browsers will handle the modern web just fine.
Next page: Real-world testing and "the convenience factor."

What is this?

Amazon Shop buttons are programmatically attached to all reviews, regardless of products' final review scores. Our parent company, IDG, receives advertisement revenue for shopping activity generated by the links. Because the buttons are attached programmatically, they should not be interpreted as editorial endorsements.Source==pc world==

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Google says Project Ara didn't fail drop test, better camera and battery coming

Google's got truly brilliant engineers in its ranks, but some could use some sharpening of their comedic skills. Today the company tweeted a clarification saying that its Project Ara modular smartphone didn't actually fail any drop test. The Ara team is still reworking how modules attach to one another, but the change apparently wasn't inspired by Ara breaking apart; Google simply found a better way. "We have been configuring a new solution," the Ara group tweeted. "It's better too."
Project Ara is also getting a better camera and longer battery life, according to two other tweets posted today. Back at Google I/O, the company wowed its keynote crowd by assembling a functioning Ara model right on stage and snapping a photo. But the quality of that image left something to be desired.

On Monday, Google revealed that it was backing off plans to conduct a Project Ara pilot in Puerto Rico later this year. The company is now targeting a 2016 introduction and says it's looking into "a few locations" in the US where Ara could make its consumer-facing debut. Project Ara team has promised more details on what's to come "soon."Source==THE VERGE

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Happy Baby in a Polka Dot Sleep Sack Flaps Her Limbs Excitedly Whenever the Family Cat Is Near

An adorable baby dressed in a polka dot starfish-like sleep sack, flapped her limbs excitedly when her mom brought the family cat to her crib to visit. While the baby was absolutely elated, the cat was less than impressed.

She’s incapable of controlling her limbs when her kitty is around. The obsession grows every day. P.S. That’s a sleep sack she’s in. Not a starfish outfit. Although I wish I were cool enough to dress my daughter in a starfish outfit.Source==

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Lightning strikes Delta plane at Atlanta airport, moment was caught on camera

The recording shows rain drenching the airfield crowded with aircraft, waiting to take off from the world’s busiest airport. The lightning strikes the plane about 17 or 18 seconds into the 36-second video.

“While filming the line of planes all stacked up during a ground hold in Atlanta on 8/18/15 I happened to capture this direct lightning strike on a 737,” wrote a YouTube by the name of Jack Perkins. He posted the video on Wednesday.
Delta spokesman Morgan Durrant confirmed that lightning struck Las Vegas-bound Delta Flight 67 on Tuesday, as the Boeing 737-900R aircraft was in the takeoff queue in Atlanta.
There were no reports of injuries among the 111 customers and six crew, Durrant said.
The plane took off nearly two hours late at 7:32 p.m. ET but landed only about 20 minutes later than scheduled, at 8:11 p.m. PT, according to FlightAware.com.
“As with any event involving aircraft, Delta is doing a thorough investigation of the circumstances around this flight as safety is always Delta’s top priority,” Durrant wrote in an email.
“Aircraft design allows lightning bolts to be safely redirected,” Durrant wrote. “Fuselage structure and industrial-grade insulation acts as (a) super-conductive lightning rod that rechannels lightning around and away from customers and crew and out into the ground via the landing gear.”
Planes are hit by lightning strikes more commonly than travelers probably realize and are designed with that in mind, commercial airline pilot and AskThePilot.com blogger Patrick Smith said.
“The energy does not travel through the cabin electrocuting the passengers; it is discharged overboard nine times in ten leaving little or no evidence of the strike itself,” Smith wrote in his book, “Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel.”Source==CNN====

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See the world's biggest heart

As the largest animal to have ever lived, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) can also be expected to have some record-breaking internal organs.
Tales of its heart being as big as a car, with the aorta (its main artery) large enough for a human to swim through abound, but as finding intact specimens to research is rare, the truth has been difficult to find out.

So when a dead blue whale washed ashore in Newfoundland, Canada, experts saw a valuable opportunity.
A team from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was sent to dissect the 76.5ft (23.3m) blue whale, which had died after becoming trapped in ice.

This is the first blue whale heart to be anatomically preserved

"We had to get the chest cavity opened to expose the heart and then get in there and free the heart up from all of the surrounding tissues, getting in with what was left of the lungs and blood, pretty much up to my waist," explains Jacqueline Miller, a mammalogy technician from the ROM.
"It took four of us to push the heart out through a window we'd made between the ribs and the side of the chest cavity."
The organ that they retrieved can be seen in the video clip above, taken from Big Blue Live, a new series coming soon to BBC One in the UK and PBS in the US.
"I was expecting something the size of a car, but found a heart more like the size of maybe a small golf cart or circus bumper car for two," Ms Miller says.

The blue whale represents the extreme upper limit of size and physiology

The aorta was also discovered to be slightly smaller than it is reputed to be, probably capable of fitting a human head inside.
But at 28st 4lb (180kg) it was still hefty and the ROM team used about 1,000 gallons of formaldehyde, which stops tissue from decomposing any further, to begin the preservation process.
"To our knowledge this is the first blue whale heart to be anatomically preserved for exhibit and study. People are always curious how big it is, and if it is the same as our heart, structurally," Ms Miller says.
The blue whale heart, along with the skeleton of the animal it came from, will eventually be put on display at the museum.
The team are also working with Dr Robert Henry and Dr Paul Nader, two anatomy specialists from Lincoln Memorial University, Tennessee, US, to properly document the whale.
"The blue whale represents the extreme upper limit of size and physiology, and its behaviour and physiological tolerances should be accordingly affected," Ms Miller says.
"Anatomically, not a lot has been published about the blue whale heart. We'd also like to have an answer for our visitors when they ask 'how big is it'?"Source==BBC====

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Yahoo Weather warns you about rain in time to find an umbrella

Weather apps are quite handy, and now Yahoo's mobile software is even more helpful. The app will send you an alert 15 minutes before rain or snow is expected to start so you have enough time to prepare. The new feature offers warnings similar to Dark Sky's weather info. That app takes readings from the barometric sensors in users' iPhones, though. What's more, Yahoo says its Weather software is more accurate too, with the ability to zoom in on small areas should the need arise. Of course, you want to take a slightly different approach to getting your forecast, you could always go the route of an aspiring meteorologist..Source==engadget===

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Google is doubling down on biotech

Re/code, Asa MathatGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin
Google is doubling down on biotech.
The company is turning the team that develops smart contact lenses and other healthcare initiatives into a full-fledged, standalone company rather than a lab project.
The life sciences group will "graduate" from the Google X labs and become its own separate company under the new Alphabet corporate structure, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said on Thursday.
Andy Conrad, a molecular biologist who joined Google in 2013, will be the CEO of the new company, Brin said.
"While the reporting structure will be different, their goal remains the same. They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing—and, hopefully—transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease," Brin explained. 
The move could signal that Google views some of the life science initiatives as promising enough to be their own commercial entity.
The move follows Google's announcement last week of a massive overhaul of its corporate structure. What was once Google will become a holding company called Alphabet, made up of several individual companies including Google's traditional Web businesses (search, maps, YouTube, Android, and so on), Nest (Google's home appliances group) and Fiber (Google's high speed Internet delivery service). 
Google X, the research lab for projects such as self-driving cars and airborne wind turbines, will also become a separate subsidiary within Alphabet.GoogleGoogle's smart contract lens
The life sciences group, which will now be pulled out of X, includes a nanodiagnostics platform, a cardiac and activity monitor, and the Baseline Study, Brin noted in the post.
The Baseline Study is an effort by Google to collect genetic and molecular information from hundreds of people to create a picture of what a healthy human body looks like. 
With the move, Alphabet will actually have two health-focused companies under its flag: the new life sciences company (which presumably will get a catchier name at some point) and Calico, a separate company that Google created in 2013 that is focused on health issues related to aging.
Here's Brin's full Google+ post on the life sciences change:
3 years ago we embarked on a project to put computing inside a contact lens – an immensely challenging technical problem with an important application to health.  While I am delighted at the progress that project has made, I could not have imagined the potential of the initiative it has grown into – a life sciences team with the mission to develop new technologies to make healthcare more proactive.  The efforts it has spawned include  a nanodiagnostics platform, a cardiac and activity monitor, and the Baseline Study.
It’s a huge undertaking, and I am delighted to announce that the life sciences team is now ready to graduate from our X lab and become a standalone Alphabet company, with Andy Conrad as CEO.  While the reporting structure will be different, their goal remains the same. They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing—and, hopefully—transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease.  

   
The team is relatively new but very diverse including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts.  This is the type of company we hope will thrive as part of Alphabet and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

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California .. Assistant to legalize euthanasia

Lawmakers restored, California, Tuesday, put forward a draft law allows the termination of life with the help of a doctor had collapsed amid opposition from the Catholic Church and activists defending people with special needs, as leaders pledged to Democrats that this issue top priority.In a move that made it clear that lawmakers are seeking to rally support from Catholics Hispanic - who are concerned about opposition to the Church's supporters display a draft law to support senior Catholic politicians Hispanics, Tuesday.Some of them spoke Spanish passionately about the suffering endured by patients suffering from the disease is impossible to recover their doctors say it will kill them inevitably.Democrat Kevin de Leon, said the Council of elders of the state of California: "It is not the people of California can wait more than that."Supporters of the termination of life with the help of a doctor had tried many times to no avail give legislative nature of this bill in California.The renewed debate on the issue after that erupted after the death of terminally ill American Brittany Maynard her recovery from cancer (29 years) last year, which moved to Oregon to take advantage of the application of this law in the state.With the opinion polls, which indicate the continuing support for this action in California more US states in terms of population put Democratic lawmakers draft law after the death of Maynard allows the termination of life with the help of a doctor to hopeless of recovery.The bill met strong opposition at first from hospitals, doctors and organizations opposed to abortion and groups defending the rights of people with special needs, as this law applies in

the states of Oregon, Washington and Montana and Vermont.

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Scientists produce "human brain" almost completed

Scientists succeeded at the American University of Ohio for the first time in the production of human brain almost complete configuration within the medical laboratory.
Scientists seek behind this little brain, approximates the size of a pencil eraser, to learn more about diseases such as autism, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease (known as Parkinson's disease).

And it looks like a new brain brain 5 weeks old embryo, contains 99% of the cells and genes in the brains of human embryos, as nerve cells includes circuits for signal transmission, according to Professor Rene Anand supervisor of the experiment.
Anand stressed during the presentation of the "new brain" during one of the seminars in Florida Tuesday, that he get drunk more integrated model of the human brain, which is being developed to date, ask where production team of researchers about 12 weeks.
And Anand and his team used cells from the skin of adults and around to the stem cells can be used to produce any tissue in the human body.

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