They want that pastoral setting as they drive down a country road and see cows in a pasture,
showing new ideas to students, reading on the bus, train or plane the list goes on and on.#
I d give the whole business away to the milkman. Then there are the moments when
I m sitting in an airport, waiting for a flight, and the guy next to me pulls out his ipad with MY handle on it that s what I m working night and day for,
repairmen and delivery drivers#that offer little of Silicon valley s riches or glamour. Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas,
and as foot traffic has increased, turnover rates in many stores have increased, too. Internal surveys at stores have also found surprising dissatisfaction levels, particularly among technicians,
And even those who used Apple as a launching pad described a gradual evolution, from team player to skeptic,
It often starts with an invitation to a seminar, held in a conference room at a hotel.
who attended his seminar in a hotel in Dedham, Mass.,in 2009. My dream my whole life was to work for Apple and suddenly,
And we all got two tacos from a taco truck. That was our surprise. Two tacos.#
is sized a compact car device that sits on a irrigation canal s floor and utilizes the steady,
To that end, the U s. Bureau of Reclamation has begun a pilot test program in the Roza Canal in Washington.
when we travel half way around the world we experience jet lag. But this clock can be reset by light.
while today we hear the motor of an approaching car. Hearing also enables rapid communication between individuals and between animals.
and travel for miles. A dolphin pod can find a dolphin pup lost in the ocean through its distress chirps.
And they installed electric streetcars lines in towns. All of these other gadgets gave us the light bulb.
Although the skintight shorts are being marketed to athletes and coaches, they could be useful for the deskbound.
you re done. 6. The Congestion Killer Traffic jams can form out of the simplest things.
One driver gets too close to another and has to brake, as does the driver behind,
as does the driver behind him#pretty soon, the first driver has sent a stop -and-go shock wave down the highway.
One driving-simulator study found that nearly half the time one vehicle passed another, the lead vehicle had a faster average speed.
All this leads to highway turbulence, which is why many traffic modelers see adaptive cruise control (A c. C.)#which automatically maintains a set distance behind a car and the vehicle in front of it#as the key to congestion relief.
Simulations have found that if some 20 percent of vehicles on a highway were equipped with advanced A c. C.,
certain jams could be avoided simply through harmonizing speeds and smoothing driver reactions. One study shows that even a highway that is running at peak capacity has only 4. 5 percent of its surface area occupied.
More sophisticated adaptive cruse control systems could presumably fit more cars on the road. When a quarter of the vehicles on a simulated highway had A c. C,
. cumulative travel time dropped by 37.5 percent. In another simulation, giving at least a quarter of the cars A c. C. cut traffic delays by up to 20 percent.
By 2017 an estimated 6. 9 million cars each year will come with A c. C. 7. Anti-theft Handlebars Here s an old idea
whose time has come again. The bearing system that allows the bike to turn can be locked
so that a thief can t steer his stolen bike. The lock is internal, meaning that he d have to destroy the bike to ride it away. 8. No more Greasy Chains An updated shaft drive
#which replaces the chain with a rod and internal gear system#would be perfect for urban riders.
They re popular in China right now but new versions will be lighter and have sophisticated more gearing. 9. One-piece Plastic
and Carbon-fiber Frames Plastic frames were tried back in the 90s, but they were too heavy.
The materials and technology have improved. Thermoplastics are cheap and practically impervious to the elements. 10.
Doctor On board Your car is already able to call for help when an accident occurs, but within a few years, it ll tip paramedics off to probable injuries too.
E. M. T s would know the likelihood of internal bleeding or traumatic head injury, for example,
Researchers at the University of Michigan International Center for Automotive Medicine have created the predictive models by cross-referencing the crash data provided by sensors on cars, like speed and location of impact, with 3-D
A Nice Little Cabin in the Sky The typical plane cabin is drier than the Arizona desert,
But there are already planes in the air#made mostly of carbon fiber#that solve this problem. Carbon fiber is markedly stronger by weight than the aluminum used for most existing planes,
which means that the interior air pressure can be adjusted to more comfortable levels without the risk of damaging the fuselage.
Airlines also keep humidity levels low now to prevent the plane s metal skin from corroding,
Japan airlines and Nippon Airlines bought the first crop of these new planes. They re currently in service between Tokyo and Boston. 12.
The Rolling Arcade The industrial designer Jiang Qian has conceived of a subway strap that s also a video game.
while the train is in motion is part of the challenge. And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you
human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial.
In fact, the avatars were moving 2 percent faster, and the human cyclists matched them, reaching new levels of speed.
Lying is obviously not a long-term strategy#once you realize what s going on, the effects may evaporate.
Roller coasters with Wings On traditional roller coasters your weight is centered over the wheels, but two new coasters#the X Flight at Six Flags Great America and Dollywood s Wild Eagle#have you hanging off the side of the track, dangling in midair.
It s kind of like you re sitting on the wings of a plane. The swiss company Bolliger & Mabillard had to completely reimagine the seat design to handle the stress caused by the differently distributed weight. 20.
A World without Hangovers Researchers at Imperial College London are closing in on a formula for a new kind of booze#synthetic alcohol
The Mind-reading Shopping cart In February, Chaotic Moon Labs began testing a robotic shopping cart that acts a bit like a mind-reading butler.
To start it up you can text message the cart s built-in tablet computer. Now it knows who you are and
what you need for dinner. The cart uses Microsoft s Kinect motion-sensor technology to track
and follow you through the store, pointing you#in a synthy voice reminiscent of A g. P. S. navigator#toward products on your list.
The system will also warn you if you ve added something that violates your dietary restrictions.
Still only a prototype, the cart isn t nearly as nimble as its human-powered cousin,
Items you add to the cart can be scanned automatically and you can finalize your purchase from the device,
#Is NASA tracking the Cosmic Shift? Cosmic changes are coming. When it comes to terraforming,
#explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together
IBEX program scientist at NASA Headquarters. Interstellar space just beyond the edge of the solar system is unexplored mostly territory.
Voyager measurements are relatively local to the spacecraft, however. IBEX is filling in the big picture.#
The Sun traveling through the Galaxy happens to cross at the present time a blob of gas about ten light-years across, with a temperature of 6-7 thousand degrees kelvin.
discovered last year by a NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas
These received massive attention recently as citizen scientists#discovered a huge increase in these in our galaxy.
These are the product of new star formation in the galaxy so something is turning on the power!
NASA may be controlled a heavily and mostly covert agency, but they ve gotta produce enough public results to justify their funding and existence.
Unlike the painstakingly slow 400-year period between Davinci s drawings of flying machines and the Wright Brother s first flight, development cycles in the digital era can now be measured in hours and minutes
If a company offered cheap wireless cameras that could be placed around a home, commercial property, on cars,
Noise from cars, machines and other forms of human activity could affect the growth of wild flowers,
In the report, marking the tenth anniversary of its first Tobacco Atlas, the WLF and the American Cancer Society said
and tobacco is responsible for more than 15 percent of all male deaths and 7 percent of female deaths, the new Tobacco Atlas report found.
In developing countries, much food spoils before it gets to market due to poor roads and lack of refrigeration.
Often farmers have to travel up to 20 kilometers to get their milk to market, and due to the country s high temperatures, much of the milk gets wasted, Jim Borel,
#Dennis miller. VW s post climate change prototype vehicle...Have you ever felt you were in a farmers dreams?..
And I always found that preparing lunch at home was a more efficient use of my time than waiting in line with a bunch of other wage slaves during lunch rush hour. 4) Font-free foods are the best.
Flagg s pilot study seems to show that they can. I was nervous when I was running the study because
It would be interesting to have a little companion with me that could see when I m becoming stressed
plant rice paddy, build roads and generate industry as India s economic growth fuels a breakneck drive in development.
He said he s trying to do what many auto mechanics have done to make their engines run more efficiently:
The new cellular machinery might be packaged in a micro-compartment that operates within the plant cell.
Griffiths and his colleagues are looking at ways to create similar micro-compartments for higher plants.
portable fuel you could put in your car. We would aim to produce hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide,
#NASA issues call for new space taxis to fly to International Space station NASA hopes to be able to fly its astronauts on commercial carriers by about 2017.
Program managers from NASA said they are looking for at least two U s. firms to design
and build space taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space station. NASA plans to invest $300 million to $500 million in each of the firms selected under new 21-month partnership agreements, Ed Mango,
manager of NASA s Commercial Crew program, said at an industry briefing at the Kennedy space center prior to the release of a solicitation on Tuesday.
The new program aims to build upon previous NASA investments in companies designing commercial passenger spaceships.
With the retirement of the U s. space shuttles last year, Russia has a monopoly on flying crews to the station,
a $100 billion orbiting laboratory for medical, materials science and other research. China, the only other country that has flown people in orbit,
Russia charges NASA about $60 million per person for rides to the station, which flies about 240 miles above Earth
and is staffed by rotating crews of six astronauts from the United states, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
to test fly their spaceships in orbit by the middle of the decade, Mango said. Goals of the demonstration flight include reaching an altitude of at least 230 miles,
maneuvering in space and staying in orbit for at least three days, Mango said. The test ships should be capable of carrying at least four people,
Since 2010, NASA has invested a total of $365. 5 million in private companies, including $130. 9 million in Boeing, $125. 6 million in Sierra nevada Corp and $75 million in Space Exploration Technologies,
or Spacex. Boeing is developing a capsule, called the CST-100, which would fly on an Atlas 5 rocket.
Spacex, already selected by NASA to fly cargo to the station, plans to upgrade its Dragon freighter
and Falcon 9 rocket to fly crew as well. Sierra nevada is developing a winged vehicle called the Dream Chaser that resembles a miniature space shuttle.
Like Boeing s spaceship, it too would launch aboard Atlas 5 rockets, which are manufactured and sold by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed martin partnership.
NASA has $406 million to spend on commercial crew programs for the year that began October 1.
Mango said about 75 percent of that money is available for the next phase of the program
with awards expected in July or August. Because of future funding uncertainties, NASA is asking its potential partners to propose how they would proceed with flat funding of $400 million a year after 2014,
as well as how much they would need to get to a flight demonstration. If we have multiple partners,
we think the most we might be able to give them in the long term might be something along the lines of $400 million per partner,
#Mango said. NASA hopes to be able to fly its astronauts on commercial carriers by about 2017.
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#Fracking Could Ruin New york s Organic food Industry Facing an uncertain future thanks to fracking. Once again Nut butter produces organic products in upstate New york#t s a pretty successful company as far as organic food goes,
and there is no denying that garden-fresh veggies are preferable to ones that have spent the past several days in a truck or on a supermarket shelf.
This study provides the first documented evidence that a vertebrate has adapted to the negative effects of roads apparently by evolving rapidly Salamanders breeding in roadside ponds are exposed to a host of contaminants from road runoff.
which reaches average concentrations of 70 times higher in roadside ponds compared to woodland ponds located several hundred feet from the road.
While the evolutionary consequences of roads are largely unknown, we know they are strong agents of natural selection
and nitrogen oxides (nitrogen oxides are emitted into the atmosphere during high temperature combustion, for example by combustion of fossil fuels by motor vehicles and in coal fired power plants).
These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy:
Unlike some laptops that schools roll into the classroom on carts and then roll back out again for the next class,
and invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. Ford had its Evos concept car on display at CES 2012 turning heads with style and design,
but little true innovation Transportation At CES, Ford motor Company unveiled its first-ever zero emissions, electric passenger vehicle, following in the footsteps of Tesla and Nissan.
And they jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon with the new Evos Concept Car. But behind the flashy surfaces
chrome wheels, and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities. 5.)Driverless cars The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars,
and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation and urban planning.
The idea of jumping into a vehicle and having it shuttle you to your destination without anyone driving#it may sound like pure fantasy to some,
but it s far closer than most of us think. Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. 6.)Ground-Based Delivery Drones Before we have sold driverless passenger cars in any sizable quantities
we will see ground-based delivery drones hauling point-to-point cargo. Better to practice without passengers onboard to perfect the technology.
Railroads and trucking companies should be worried as this will displace much of their industry. Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES AR Drone 2. 0 Flying Drones
I happen to be a big fan of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) and already own an AR Drone.
Unveiled at CES, the new Drone 2. 0 features a 720p front-facing camera so that you can capture your flights in HD.
There s also a whole raft of new sensors including an onboard magnetometer so that it can always tell where the pilot is in relation to its flight path,
and a new air pressure sensor that allows it to be more stable when hovering. That said, these drones have very short battery life (10 min max),
and so far have little application outside of the hobbyist community. The world of flying drones will become infinitely more useful
7.)Flying-Hovering Monitor Drones Whenever an accident or disaster happens, the initial first-step should be to get eyes on the scene.#
or even on the side of a moving vehicle. 9.)Lighting Drones We ve been trapped into thinking that lighting can only be managed from stationary positions,
Automatic Pothole Detector/Reporter The connected city of the future will see cars automatically reporting
No need to wait until serious damage occurs to your vehicle. 16. Body Scanner Complete with Instant Clothing Fabricator Scanners that can create a virtual framework for custom tailored clothing is already in use.
Powering electric cars, boats, and farm equipment may not be that far off. 19.)Plant Monitors-Urban agriculture is catching on like wildfire,
as well as a virus that leads to deformed wings which had already been implicated in colony collapse disorder.
The Guerrilla Grafters address the first two problems by making sure each grafted tree has a steward#who can monitor
Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes
as a six-year old boy named Falcon had gotten somehow trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest.
Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.
#At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car,
complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.#
complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.#
2.)Top 10 Photos March 6, 2011 The inside-outside upside-downside car. The most fun you can have on four headrests
Long-time students head home from evening class in automated taxi pods, which can be called by mobile phone,
Henry ford s vision of the Sky Car is now here and the popular Aeromobil models can often be spotted over the capital,
reduced-pressure tube where pressurised capsules whisk passengers across Doha in seconds and throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council,
Many commuters travel to finance jobs in Dubai and Karachi or to oversee manufacturing in Iraq
AN AUTOMOTIVE REVOLUTION Commuting is transformed as self-driving vehicles eliminate accidents and free up time for leisure and work.
Audi, BMW, GM and Google tested them first. The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicted that autonomous cars would account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040.
holographic video conferencing reduces the need for frequent business travel. Cisco Telepresence was a frontrunner in this field.
and material science advances would reduce the typical passenger vehicle to around 90 kilograms in weight,
and worldwide Qatar is regarded as one of top destinations in the world for cultural, technological tourism, recreational choice, for work and the general happiness of its inhabitants.
The Qatari capital has made in fact the 10 of Mercer s Quality of Living Survey since 2029.
with weekly rocket flights departing to human colonies on the Moon and Mars (many of which use the same hydroponic food growing techniques perfected in Qatar) making it a truly intergalactic capital city.
I could see you sitting on the coach in my living room and you could see me sitting on your back porch,
(and bike paths and mountain views) unfairly reducing Boulder to a playground where smug eco-liberals puffed legalized marijuana
and write that everyone rides their bikes everywhere.##Out from the gleaming sunlight, a Lycra-clad cyclist whizzed majestically by.
Let me just say, it s hard to keep a straight face when touring this idyllic mountain cityand interviewing its start-up founders and venture capitalists, its coffee-shop denizens and microbrew cognoscenti.
It s so tempting to linger on the glorious hippie mane of the organic peanut butter CEO,
I can ride my mountain bike to!#)#But I don t want to be unfair or stoop to caricature.
or any monolithic industry, Boulder County (population 300,000) ranks among the top 20 most productive metro areas in terms of GDP.
It s the original home of Ball aerospace (one of the first NASA contractors herbal tea pioneer Celestial Seasonings, Storagetek (later acquired by Sun microsystems for $4. 1 billion),
and unremarkablea two-mile stretch of road at the mouth of Boulder Canyon that served as one of several mining-supply depots following the 1859 Colorado gold rush.
Wrote Isabella Bird, a British travel writer, in an 1879 book:##oeboulder is a hideous collection of framed houses on the burning plain.#
#and pandering to tourists. Above all, he said, Boulder must be beautifula prosperous town where people would spend their lives,
(#oemerc#)Mercure, one of the founding employees of Ball aerospace, who was a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at the time.
left to form Ball aerospace, which filled those contracts and others. Eventually, the government made Boulder the site of thenational Center for Atmospheric Research
Since then, the University of Colorado has become a destination for DNA and RNA research.
I can still go pick up a bundle of helium-filled balloons for ten bucks? Well, you d be right,
try not to dwell on all the balloons you ve watched float away into nothingness. Wine As a species full of wine-guzzling lushes, humanity s unquenchable thirst has put us in a bit of a predicament#300-million case predicament,
#Google s self-driving car. Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights,
signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids.
and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.
The driver in the lane to my right. He s twisted halfway around in his seat,
taking a picture of the Lexus that I m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski.
Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour,
He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so.
By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road
His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas,
and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.
Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes,
But nowadays the vehicle is marked clearly:##oeself-Driving Car.##Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute.
He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o clock, waves goodbye to his fianc e and their son,
and drives to his office in Mountain view, forty-three miles away. The ride takes him over surface streets and freeways, old salt flats and pine-green foothills, across the gusty blue of San francisco bay,
and down into the heart of Silicon valley. In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours,
but Levandowski doesn t mind. He thinks of it as research. While other drivers are gawking at him
he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow,
and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is when there s roadwork
or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen:#
as the Lexus took us across the Dumbarton Bridge.##oethis is more like Charles Lindbergh s plane.
As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, #oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves,
an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company? We ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.#
#Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#
a self-driving car will save your life. The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction:
this year s model of last century s Make it belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs
and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology.
In 1939, at the World s Fair in New york, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General motors Futurama exhibit.
Inside, a conveyor belt carried them high above a miniature landscape, spread out beneath a glass dome.
Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio-guided cars.##oedoes it seem strange?
Skyscrapers and superhighways made the deadline, but driverless cars still putter along in prototype. Human beings, as it turns out,
A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes inside.#
#oeno traffic jam...no collisions...no driver fatigue.##From 1977: Engineers huddle around a driverless Ford on a test track.#
#oecars like this one may be on the nation s roads by the year 2000!##Levandowski shook his head.#
#oewe didn t come up with this idea, #he said.##oewe just got lucky that the computers
and sensors were ready for us.##Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps:
smart roads and smart cars. General motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties.
Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,
like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal
and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets,
alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car#oeslow down, sharp curve ahead.#
#Systems like these were fairly simple and reliable, but they had a chicken-and-egg problem.
#oewhy would we invest in putting wires in the road?##Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex.
They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,
then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was steering itself around a track.
By 1995, Dickmanns s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense,
Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were controlled strictly environments.
is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve.
And though Congress had set a goal that a third of all ground combat vehicles be autonomous by 2015,
build a car that can drive a hundred and forty-two miles without human intervention. Ernst Dickmanns s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn,
but always with a driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand Challenge would be empty,
and the road would be rough: from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways, it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns;
instead of road signs and lane lines, G. P. S. waypoints.##oetoday, we could do it in a few hours,
#Thrun told me.##oebut at the time it felt like going to the moon in sneakers.#
and recalled that her son used to play with remote-control cars as a boy, crashing them into things on his bedroom floor.
#darpa s rules were vague on the subject of vehicles: anything that could drive itself would do.
He would build the world s first autonomous motorcycle. This seemed like a stroke of genius at the time.
The motorcycle could be like that, Levandowski thought: quicker off the mark than a car and more maneuverable.
It could slip through tighter barriers and drive just as fast. Also, it was a good way to get back at his mother,
who d never let him ride motorcycles as a kid.##oefine,#he thought.##oei ll just make one that rides itself.#
a motorcycle can t stand up on its own. It needs a rider to balance it#r else a complex,
the Carnegie mellon team was working with General motors, Caltech with Northrop grumman, Ohio State with Oshkosh trucking.
He gradually scraped together thirty thousand dollars from Raytheon, Advanced micro devices, and others. No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project.
Then he added a hundred thousand dollars of his own. In the meantime, he went about poaching the faculty s graduate students.#
#oeshe hated the motorcycle project.##There came a day when Goldberg realized that half his Ph d. students had been working for Levandowski.
They d begun with a Yamaha dirt bike, made for a child, and stripped it down to its skeleton.
They added cameras, gyros, G. P. S. modules, computers, roll bars, and an electric motor to turn the wheel.
#bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over#ore than six hundred times in a row.#
#oewe built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark, #Smart told me.#
#oeit s like one of my colleagues once said:##You don t understand, Charlie, this is robotics.
Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.
When the bike tipped to one side, Krasnov had it steer ever so slightly in the same direction.
This created centrifugal acceleration that pulled the bike upright again. By doing this over and over, tracing tiny S-curves as it went,
the motorcycle could hold to a straight line. On the video clip from that day, the bike wobbles a little at first,
like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field#s if guided by an invisible hand.
Caltech s Chevy Tahoe crashed into a fence. Even the winner, Carnegie mellon, earned at best a Pyrrhic victory.
A helicopter later found it beached on an embankment, wreathed in smoke, its back wheels spinning so furiously that they d burst into flame.
As for the Ghost rider, it managed to beat out more than ninety cars in the qualifying round#mile
-and-a-half obstacle course on the California Speedway in Fontana. But that was its high-water mark.
the bike sputtered forward, rolled three feet, and fell over.##oethat was a dark day,
he let his car teach itself. Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks,
modelled on those in the brain. As he drove around Pittsburgh, they kept track of his driving decisions,
gathering statistics and formulating their own rules of the road.##oewhen we started, the car was going about two to four miles an hour along a path through a park#ou could ride a tricycle faster,
#Pomerleau told me.##oeby the end, it was going fifty-five miles per hour on highways.##In 1996, the car steered itself from Washington, D c,
. to San diego with only minimal intervention#early four times as far as Ernst Dickmanns s cars had gone a year earlier.#
#oeno Hands Across America,#Pomerleau called it. Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.
A self-taught car can come to some strange conclusions. It may confuse the shadow of a tree for the edge of the road,
or reflected headlights for lane markers. It may decide that a bag floating across a road is a solid object
and swerve to avoid it. It s like a baby in a stroller deducing the world from the faces and storefronts that flicker by.
It s hard to know what it knows.##oeneural networks are like black boxes, #Pomerleau says.#
particularly when they re controlling a two-ton vehicle.##Computers, like children, are taught more often by rote.
The roughest roads in the Grand Challenge were often the easiest to navigate, because they had clear paths and well-defined shoulders.
sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy.##oeput too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,
#Sebastian Thrun told me. The second Grand Challenge put these two approaches to the test.
Stanford with its puny Volkswagen Touareg, nicknamed Stanley. It was an even match. Both teams used similar sensors and software,
Rather than program the car with models of the rocks and bushes it should avoid,
The lasers on the roof scanned the area around the car, while the camera looked farther ahead.
the computer learned to identify the flat parts as road and the bumpy parts as shoulders.
Carnegie mellon, with two cars to Stanford s one, decided to play it safe. They had Highlander run at a fast clip#ore than twenty miles an hour on average#hile Sandstorm hung back a little.
Five cars finished the hundred-and-thirty-two-mile course; more than twenty cars went farther than the winner had in 2004.
In one year, they d made more progress than darpa s contractors had in twenty.#
I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks. So they were doing things in their home shops,
built a self-driving#oedoom Buggy#that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs.
A Ford S. U. V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley.
His motorcycle embodied that evolution. Although it never made it out of the semifinals of the second race#ripped up by some wooden boards#he Ghost rider had become, in its way,
Two years later, the Smithsonian added the motorcycle to its collection; a year after that, it added Stanley as well.
and a row of what look like clown bicycles parked out front, free for the taking. When you walk in,
and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates, #Brin said.##oeit s a huge tax on the land.#
#Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they re parked on the street or in driveways and garages.
But if cars could drive themselves, there would be need no for most people to own them.
A fleet of vehicles could operate as a personalized public-transportation system, picking people up and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls.
They d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis#y some calculations, they d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars#nd far more flexible than buses or subways.
Streets would clear highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland.##oewe re not trying to fit into an existing business model,
#Brin said.##oewe are just on such a different planet.##When Thrun and Levandowski first came to Google, in 2007,
they were given a simpler task: to create a virtual map of the country. The idea came from Larry page, the company s other cofounder.
Five years earlier, Page had strapped a video camera on his car and taken several hours of footage around the Bay Area.
Google engineers went on to jury-rig some vans with G. P. S . and rooftop cameras that could shoot in every direction.
Then they equipped a hundred cars and sent them all over the United states. Google street view has since spread to more than a hundred countries.
every logging road logged on a computer, every gravel drive driven down. Over the next two years, Levandowski shuttled back and forth to Hyderabad, India,
to train more than two thousand data processors to create new maps and fix old ones. When Apple s new mapping software failed so spectacularly a year ago,
Would he be interested in building a self-driving pizza delivery car? Within five weeks, he and a team of fellow Berkeley graduates and other engineers had re
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