Ford’s fuel-economy figures for the 2013-2014 C-Max hybrids “were not based in reality” says Iowa’s attorney general. And now the Ford Motor Company “will pay $19.2 million to a consortium of 40 states and Washington,D.C.,” writes Consumer Reports (which also covers additional false advertising about the payload capacity of its Read more…
“There’s no guarantee that robot umpires will make their way to the majors,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. “But the system is as close as it has been now, one level below.” Here’s how it looks for a minor league/Triple-A team, the Albuquerque Isotopes: Using the same computerized optical tracking Read more…
Despite being around 4,300 miles in length, the Amazon River surprisingly has no bridges. The Amazon River is the world’s second-longest river and one of the planet’s most significant waterways… Given the Amazon flows through three countries (Peru, Colombia and Brazil) and more than 30 million people live in the Read more…
Trying to envision “the ‘human-machine era’, a time when the tech has moved out of our hands and into our ears, eyes, and brains.” Real-time captioning of conversation. Highly accurate instant translation. Auto voice mimicry making it sound like you speaking the translation. Real-time AR facial augmentation making it also Read more…
The IndyCar racing series is switching to an entirely renewable fuel next year. On Friday, ahead of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 race, IndyCar announced that starting next year, the race cars will be powered by a new, second-generation renewable ethanol race fuel developed by Shell. The manufacturing process for IndyCar’s ethanol Read more…
In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects. When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her Read more…
Northwestern University engineers have developed the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot — and it comes in the form of a tiny, adorable peekytoe crab. Just a half-millimeter wide, the tiny crabs can bend, twist, crawl, walk, turn and even jump. The researchers also developed millimeter-sized robots resembling inchworms, crickets and beetles. Read more…