Imagine speeding on a bike in the middle of nowhere, when the urge hits and you just have to go! Well, there’s a solution for that!
Japanese toilet maker TOTO rolled out a “Toilet Bike Neo” to raise awareness about bathroom emissions and water savings. The eco-friendly three-wheel 250cc motorcycle with a specially customized toilet-shaped seat runs on bio-fuel from the discharge of livestock or waste water.
TOTO has taken the bike on the road in Japan to promote its message. But wait, there’s more to it than meets the eye — this toilet on wheels talks to the rider, keeping him up to date on the latest stock prices or weather reports
Justin “Nordic Thunder” Howard won the 17th Air Guitar World Championship in Oulu, Finland. The event drew 5,000 people to the city center to watch 18 contestants from around the world battle for the grand prize — a real guitar.
Globally, says, John Bussey in the WSJ, the number is “nearly 40%,” so America’s not much off the norm.
For China to truly advance and become a genuine competitive threat, the political system has to decide to divorce wealth from political power. Otherwise we’re looking at decay and decline and a very short “Chinese century.”
US hit that moment and launched itself into a multi-decade progressive era that cleaned up a lot of things but government most of all.
As I have said many times, the world needs a small army of Teddy Roosevelts right now – but China most of all.
The four passengers at the the Werribee Open Range Zoo, in Melbourne, Australia in the jeep must feel a whisker away from death as a lion jumps up on to their hood for lunch. But that’s all part of the attraction. The jeep is a new zoo exhibit which allows visitors to get incredibly close to the lions.
At first glance, that proposition seems preposterous. After all, the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, held $3.24 trillion of foreign currency reserves at the end of the first half of this year. Yet foreign currency, no matter how plentiful, has limited usefulness in a local currency crisis. In any event, the PBOC’s foreign currency holdings are almost evenly matched with renminbi-denominated liabilities that were incurred to acquire all those dollars, pounds, euros, and yen. As a result, the central bank cannot use the reserves without driving itself deep—actually, deeper—into insolvency.
When shops close to avoid predatory officials, we know China’s coffers are almost empty. And to make matters worse, the country’s financial problems will be harder to solve now that the country’s balance of payments has turned negative. The net outflow in the second quarter of this year was the first since 1998. The country’s reserves also dropped in Q2. We should not be surprised: there was perhaps $110 billion of capital flight during that period, and the gusher outflow looks like it continued in June. Chinese citizens are losing confidence fast.
No developing country has ever escaped a major financial crisis. The People’s Republic of China is about to have its first one now
Taylor Wilson always dreamed of creating a star. Now he’s become one. This story about a 14 year old prodigy will be directed by Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols. Wilson gained notoriety for experimenting with nuclear materials with his parents’ approval, and achieving nuclear fusion by the age of 14.
When his grandmother became ill with cancer, Wilson also attempted to develop a cure for the disease using short-lived isotopes.
The film will reportedly contrast Wilson’s story with the similar tale of Michigan teenager David Hahn, whose attempt to build a breeder reactor in his parents’ shed achieved results that were more dangerous than desirable. Link below is to original story. Picture is of Taylor in his garage.
The PowerPC RAD750 chip at the heart of the Curiosity Mars rover’s central computer can withstand temperature extremes and massive doses of space radiation without the dreaded ‘blue screen of death.’
“First, you have to develop the radiation hardening techniques and actually implement them in the design,” said Scott Doyle, a BAE systems engineer for satellite electronics. “The next step is you have to qualify each of those individual components and that qualification is normally a year, a year-and-a-half, just to do that.””Then they get integrated on the board, and that board has to go through qualification activity to prove out the board. Then once that board gets integrated into the satellite at the system level, there’s several years worth of qualification testing that goes in at the satellite level. You add all that up, you’re talking five to eight years of qualification work.”
The resulting computers can cost anywhere from $200,000 to a half-million dollars. While all that might seem like overkill to an outsider, space-based computers simply have to work. “There’s no repairman in space,” Doyle said.
But given the unavoidable limitations in processing speed and memory, Curiosity’s programmers face a daunting task when it comes to writing software. “What’s hard about this, my phone has a processor that’s 10 times as fast as the processor that’s on Curiosity and it has 16 times as much storage as Curiosity has and my phone doesn’t have to land anything on Mars,” Cichy said. “All my phone has to do is follow (a friend’s) Twitter feed.”
Japanese toilet maker TOTO rolled out a “Toilet Bike Neo” to raise awareness about bathroom emissions and water savings. The eco-friendly three-wheel 250cc motorcycle with a specially customized toilet-shaped seat runs on bio-fuel from the discharge of livestock or waste water.
