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A self-driving car being developed by Google Inc. took a blind man for a ride this week, driving him to a Taco Bell and then to a dry cleaner in San Jose, Calif.

Google posted a video of a modified Toyota Prius driving Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, saying it shows one of the possibilities and benefits that could come from the technology.

The self-driving car took Mahan to Taco Bell for a quick meal and a dry cleaner to pick up his clothes.

Driverless taxis will be carrying passengers during demonstration projects in five European cities as of February 2014.

cybercars, by the EU-funded CityMobil2 project, is one of a number of research initiatives that are testing out specially designed self-driving road vehicles as the technology required to navigate them becomes cheaper and more reliable.

Cybercars have traditionally sensed the world through expensive gyroscopes, microwaves and laser beams

In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle

In the Netherlands, which has only 1/18 of the U.S.’s population, that number is close to 26 percent

With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company

First cell phone call

In 1973, the first portable phone call was placed by inventor Martin Cooper. The phone was 10 inches in height, 3 inches deep and an inch-and-a-half wide and weighed 30-oz. Since then, cell phones have shrunk to a mere palm-size weighing 4-oz, and are used by a billion people around the world. Cooper's first ''shoebox'' phone replaced a car phone of the time that weighed more than 30 pounds and cost thousands of dollars. A car phone owner had to drill a hole in his car to install the antenna and most of the phone sat in the trunk. A control unit with a handset was placed inside the car

Developed by researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the camera creates a heatmap-like view of machinery (or anything else

30 digital microphones and a high-res camera pick up on what's making noise, and an image shows the different levels of noise, organized by a color gradient

Blue means a little noise, while red is the most extreme level.

So far, robotic rovers have reached out to the moon and Mars, with astronauts actually driving a lunar car on the moon during NASA's Apollo program

Leading the pack is an oldie of a space mission: the Soviet-era Lunakhod 2. This huge moon rover drove 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the moon during its 1973 mission and is currently the world champion for off-world driving, winning the gold medal

In second place

people typically blame Southern California's smog on automobiles, a new study suggests that cows may be just as responsible, if not more so

large fraction of the region's smog, especially the particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, is ammonium nitrate

particles form in the atmosphere when ammonia, which is generated by cars with certain types of catalytic converters and by bacteria that consume cattle waste, reacts with nitrogen oxides that are produced in large quantities in automobile emissions

Five Canadians made the trek to Florida to watch the final shuttle launch last year. They are wrapping up filming and interviews — which included astronauts and sci-fi stars — to discuss the legacy of the program.

How did you get down there?

drove the entire journey from Toronto to the Titusville/Cocoa Beach area

an electric vehicle that when driven is about eight feet long, but when parked, can be squeezed or folded down to just five feet, which is shorter than the average bicycle

A person leaving work could walk to a lot where several of the Hirikos are parked, rent one to drive to the train station, leave it there in a special lot, ride the train home, rent another Hiriko to get home, keep it overnight, then drive it back to the special lot, leave it there and then take the train to work and so on

engineers have designed all four tires to turn independently, allowing drivers to slide sideways into spots if necessary

Glenn in orbit

In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996

its comparative proximity, along with the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail

CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 (CFBDSIR2149 for short

alling the object a rogue planet candidate for now, as they want to study it further to confirm its free-floating status

A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.

Researchers

have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis

The Denmark-based LEGO Group chose a fan-built model of the car-size rover to be the next release in its CUUSOO line of building brick toys.

Pakbaz designed the model to feature many of the details of the real Mars rover, including its "rocker-bogie" wheel suspension that enables Curiosity to navigate the Martian surface

He separately built a model of the rover's "sky crane" descent stage, which lowered Curiosity down into the crater, although whether that component will make it into the final product is not yet known