A boat that fuels itself is setting off around the world from Paris on a six-year journey that its designers hope will serves as a model for emissions-free energy networks of the future.
Energy Observer will use its solar panels, wind turbines and a hydrogen fuel cell system to power its trip. The 5 million-euro ($5.25 million) boat heads off Saturday from Paris toward the Atlantic. Continue reading »
A Japanese firm said on February 1 that it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.
Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day.
It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.
The farm, measuring about 4,400 square metres , will have floor-to-ceiling shelves where tAhe produce is grown. Continue reading »
Flying cars are still a Jetsonian dream, but self-driving cars are just over the horizon. Recently, Google and Audi have showed off autonomous automobiles that do some, but not all, of the driving for you.
Demonstrations of self-driving cars — as well as government-sponsored competitions — generally take place in empty parking lots or other controlled spaces. Because, of course, they aren’t legal on the open road. Or are they? Continue reading »
Among the most iconic images of the Nepal conflict is the photograph of a woman embracing the body of her dead husband on a blood-stained battlefield littered with the bodies of other policemen executed after capture. Grisly as this picture is, it is another picture from Dailekh of a young girl with tears streaming down her cheek that is actually even more disturbing.
That girl is weeping silently as her mother, Laxmi, tells a press conference in Kathmandu in 2005 about the disappearance of her husband, Dekendra Thapa. Like tens of thousands of other personal tragedies of the conflict, the girl’s story would have been forgotten had it not been for the personal crusade for justice of her mother, Dailekh’s journalists and human rights activists. Continue reading »