A family who spent nine years in a basement “waiting for the end of time” have been discovered by police in the Netherlands after one of them turned up at a local pub, reports say. The BBC reports: A man of 58 and a family with young adults aged 18 to 25 were living at a farm in the province of…
Tag: Netherlands
Soil on moon and Mars likely to support crops
Researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands have produced crops in Mars and Moon soil simulant developed by NASA. The research supports the idea that it would not only be possible to grow food on Mars and the Moon to feed future settlers, but also to obtain viable seed from crops grown there. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-soil-moon-mars-crops.html…
Google’s Stadia Cloud Gaming Service Will Launch on November 19
Google’s Stadia game streaming service will launch on November 19th, the company’s Rick Osterloh announced today at the company’s fall hardware event. From a report: In a separate blog post published during the keynote, Google added that servers will open to the public at 12PM EST/9AM PST. Besides the US, Stadia will launch in Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain,…
The UK’s National Health System Just Opened A Treatment Center for Videogame Addiction
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The battle against gaming addiction entered a new era this week when the U.K. public health system, the National Health Service (NHS), announced the opening of its first center specializing in ‘Internet and Gaming Disorders….’ Starting in November, the London-based center’s psychiatrists and clinical psychologists will work with patients between ages 13 and 25 whose lives…
‘There’s an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It’s Just Mostly Invisible’
“There is no ‘robot apocalypse’, even after a major corporate automation event,” writes Gizmodo, citing something equally ominous in new research by a team of economists. merbs shared their report: Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies — whether they’re fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit –…
Controlling robots across oceans and space
This Autumn is seeing a number of experiments controlling robots from afar, with ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano directing a robot in The Netherlands and engineers in Germany controlling a rover in Canada. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-robots-oceans-space.html…
Startups Are Using Insect Larvae To Produce Protein-Rich Ingredients For Animals
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: AgriProtein is among a small number of start-ups that are using insect larvae to produce protein-rich ingredients for animal feed. This nascent industry could help feed a growing human population in a way that’s less damaging to the environment. Protix opened one of the world’s largest insect farms in June…
Feds Order Apple and Google To Hand Over Names of 10,000+ Users of Gun Scope App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Own a rifle? Got a scope to go with it? The government might soon know who you are, where you live and how to reach you. That’s because Apple and Google have been ordered by the U.S. government to hand over names, phone numbers and other identifying data of at least 10,000 users…
Three Years Later, France’s Solar Road is a Flop
DigressivePoser and schwit1 both submitted the same story. That 1-km ( .62-mile) “solar road” paved with photovoltaic panels in France is “too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” reports Popular Mechanics: Le Monde describes the road as “pale with its ragged joints,” with “solar panels that peel off the road and the many splinters [from] that enamel…
Conceptual design ready for PLATO telescope simulator
SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research designs and builds a space simulator to test and calibrate eight out of twenty-six cameras for ESA’s next exoplanet hunter telescope, PLATO. The conceptual design is now complete. PLATO will be able to spot smaller planets in larger orbits than its predecessors. This could lead to the discovery of Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone….