Taxi drivers, in general, are far more knowledgeable about the cities in which they drive than Google could ever be alone. London cabbies spend years learning what's called "The Knowledge," a requirement to become a certified cabbie. Studies have shown that parts of cabbies' brains are larger than average as a result of The Knowledge.
Microsoft hit on a way to pick cabbies brains in China, pulling that knowledge into a database. They collected GPS data from 33,000 cabs, reports Technology Review. The software giant presented its findings at the International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in California this week. The researchers say the routes produced by their system are faster than 60% of those suggested by Google Maps -- saving about 5 minutes, on average, on what would otherwise be a 30-minute drive.
One subject, 46-year-old Mikka Terho from Finland, was able to read large letters and a clock face, and differentiate between shades of gray a few days after the implant and his eyes eventually became adjusted to the light.
The chip, operated by a battery-powered cable implanted behind the ear, converts light into electrical impulses that act on the optic nerve. The device did not work on the other eight volunteers because it was implanted less deeply in the eye, according to the paper.
$0.90 – $1.58 Delhi, India
$0.97 – $1.28 Mumbai, India
$1.04 – $1.73 Cairo, Egypt
$1.14 – $1.71 La Paz, Bolivia
$1.17 – $1.87 Manila, Philippines
$1.22 – $2.03 Mexico City, Mexico
$1.23 – $2.94 Panama City, Panama
$1.23 – $1.68 Kuta, Bali, Indonesia
$1.24 – $1.86 Fez, Morocco
$1.29 – $1.94 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Mr Clifford, 36, a carpet fitter who has a ''face that makes children cry'', said: ''I've been a joke to women for years because of the way I look.
''I always thought that I was too ugly to meet Mrs Right but my life changed when I met Janine.
''She's beautiful and I love her in every possible way. I still can't believe this is happening.''[...]
Miss Walker, a shop assistant who lives with her parents, agreed.
''The rest, as they say, is history,'' she said.
"I appreciate that Tom isn't Brad Pitt, but then I'm no Angelina Jolie either.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to me Tom's the perfect, handsome prince."
She added: "I'm just so pleased to have been able to meet him, and I'm head-over-heels in love."
[...]John Lennon wanted to play the role of the avaricious creature Gollum and Paul McCartney was to play Frodo Baggins in a proposed '60s Beatles movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy that never reached fruition. In fact, says Jackson, it was the author himself who nixed the plan. "It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage, but he didn't like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it," Jackson told the newspaper. George Harrison would have played the role that eventually went to Sir Ian McKellen, that of the wise wizard Gandalf, and Ringo Starr would have been Frodo's devoted sidekick, Sam.
Metamaterials work by interrupting and channelling the flow of light at a fundamental level; in a sense they can be seen as bouncing light waves around in a prescribed fashion to achieve a particular result.[...]
Ortwin Hess, a physicist who recently took up the Leverhulme Chair in Metamaterials at Imperial College London, called the work "a huge step forward in very many ways".
"It clearly isn't an invisibility cloak yet - but it's the right step toward that," he told BBC News.
The system, propped on a person's head, uses a custom made eye-tracker to monitor the person's eye movements. It then precisely reproduces those movements using a superfast actuator-driven mechanism with yaw, pitch, and roll rotation, like a human eyeball. When the real eye move, the robot eye follows suit.
Mice were trained to push levers to get either of two rewards. Press one lever, out comes a drop of sugar water. Press the other and they get a drop of different tasting sugar water.
Then things got interesting. For one of the treats, scientists gradually increased the amount of effort required for the payoff—from one lever-press to five, then 10, then 15. So by the end of the session, one type of sugar water cost 15 times more effort than the other.
The mice then retired to their home cage where both treats were freely available. And they showed a strong preference for whichever reward they’d worked harder to obtain. Based on how fast the mice sipped, they appeared to find the costlier sugar water more tasty.
