Archive for the ‘News’ Category

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Solar Plane Glides Skyward on Test Run

What could be the next step in airplane evolution is now in the air.
Solar Impulse, a plane whose makers hope will one day be able to fly for up to a day using only the Sun’s energy, took off from Switzerland on a 24-hour test flight.
The plane, which has 12,000 solar cells, is designed [...]

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‘Flying Car’ Really Getting Off the Ground

Makers of “the flying car” have cleared a major hurdle and are planning to get their product in the hands of owners by the end of 2011.
Terrafugia, accompany based in Woburn, Mass., has been granted a special weight limit exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Transition, “the flying car.”
The vehicle is a [...]

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Toughest Word in Hangman: Jazz

Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or certainly Wynton and Branford Marsalis would certainly have something to say about this: the hardest word to solve in the age-old game of Hangman is JAZZ.
This according to a computer programmer who wrote a program specifically to tell his daughter how she could beat a computerized version of [...]

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Pakistan: Rains Let Up, Aid Still Lagging

The rains have eased across Pakistan, but aid is still slow in coming, according to the Pakistani government and international authorities.
Rainstorms were expected to ease for a few days during monsoon season, and relief officials were hopeful that flooding would recede and relief efforts could go forward amid one of the worst disasters in [...]

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Computers Add Up All Possible Solutions for Rubik’s Cube

Get a computer to do it, and it takes only 20 moves. A human problem-solver, however, takes about 40.
It is the solving of the Rubik’s Cube, the multi-colored handheld puzzle-toy that has been entertaining and perplexing millions of people since its invention in 1974.
Now comes word that a team including researchers from more than [...]

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Monsoon Flooding Overruns Relief Efforts in Pakistan

The rain keeps falling on Pakistan, as the country reels from some of the worst monsoons in nearly a century. Millions of people have been left homeless, hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed, and the death toll has topped 1,600.
Pakistan, not exactly a rich country, has large swaths of people [...]

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Cross-country Trek to Test Driverless Vans

Vehicles driving themselves? It could happen, in the not too distant future, especially if more events like this take place: Engineers are off to road-test driverless vehicles on an 8,000-mile journey from Italy to China.
The pair of orange van-like vehicles will technically have no drivers, although technicians will be sitting the driver’s seats and [...]

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Bad Weather Rips Through Haiti ‘Safe Haven’

Six months after a devastating killed hundreds of thousands of people, Haitian residents are still suffering.
One of the few “safe” spots has been a main relocation camp near Corail-Cesselesse, about 15 miles north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, where the bulk of the earthquake damage occurred. In April, U.N. peacekeepers, U.S. military personnel, famous people [...]

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Graphic Novel to Tell Anne Frank’s Story

The Anne Frank House Museum, in Amsterdam, has announced plans to publish a graphic novel version of the biography of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who died in a World War II concentration camp but whose diary is one of the most-read books on the planet.
Frank wrote in her diary in her teen [...]