$2 million Bugatti crashes into lagoon

By Chris Paschenko Wrecker driver Gilbert Harrison, with MCH Towing, pulls a Bugatti Veyron, one of the world’s fastest production cars, from the water by the north frontage road of Interstate 45 near Omega Bay on Wednesday afternoon. By Chris Paschenko The Daily News Published November 12, 2009 LA MARQUE — The owner of one of the world’s fastest production automobiles accidentally drove his fine-tuned, French-built car into a saltwater lagoon Wednesday. The man, who police said was from Lufkin, was uninjured after escaping the partially submerged Bugatti Veyron as it came to rest in about 2 feet of saltwater. The two-seater, with 16 cylinders and four turbo chargers, can reach speeds of more than 250 mph. New models sell for about $2 million. The man, who refused to give his name, was looking at real estate in Galveston. About 3 p.m. a low-flying pelican distracted him as he traveled north on Interstate 45 just south of the hurricane levee near Omega Bay. The man jerked the wheel, dropped his cell phone, and the car’s front tire left the frontage road and entered a muddy patch, which foiled his attempt to maneuver away from the lagoon. The Veyron’s powerful engine gurgled like an outboard motor for about 15 minutes before it died. Police and firefighters blocked the frontage road until MCH Towing employee Gilbert Harrison carefully wenched the car away from riprap and onto the soft, muddy bank. It’s the rarest car in the world, not something you can just replace, the man said. An Associated Press story in October mentioned a 2006 model Veyron for sale in Jonesboro, Ark., with an asking price of $1.25 million. One of the prospective buyers was from Texas. That Bugatti Veyron was one of only 200 made and one of only about 15 in the United States, the AP reported.

Youths See All Parental Control Negatively When There's A Lot Of It

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — A new study has found that young people feel differently about two types of parental control, generally viewing a type of control that's thought to be better for their development more positively. However, when parents are very controlling, young people no longer make this distinction and view both types of parental control negatively.

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Great White Sharks Visiting San Francisco

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 12, @03:11AM
from the I-left-my-harp-seal-in-San-Francisco dept.

earth

idle

news

science

Ponca City, We love you writes"Juliet Eilperin writes in the Washington Post that while for years, humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore, it turns out we were wrong. Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach satellite tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts to track the sharks and discovered that Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February, foraging among elephant seals, sea lions, and other prey. The sharks were spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge. 'It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,' says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block. The fact that 'a major concentration' of great whites can ignore humans 'shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,' says Salvador J. Jorgensen."

Bing To Use Wolfram Alpha Results

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 12, @12:02AM
from the taking-a-look dept.

microsoft

technology

angry tapir writes"Microsoft is rolling out some enhancements to its Bing search engine, including some that rely on computational information delivered by Wolfram Alpha. That means that people will be able to search for some complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers. In a blog post, Tracey Yao, program manager, and Pedro Silva, product manager at Microsoft, give some examples."

Ferrari-styled OutRun arcade machine set for crazy scooter transformation? (video)

by Tim Stevens posted Nov 12th 2009 at 7:46AM

If you're a child of the '80s and a gamer to boot you surely remember OutRun, the game that rocked a generation with only some parallax effects and pixelated blonde hair -- though the giant arcade cabinet with gold wheels certainly didn't hurt. Now "contemporary artist" Garnet Hertz (creator of the twitching, crunchy frog server) is proposing to give that very cabinet a new lease on life, and a motorized one at that. Hertz wants to take an arcade machine and merge it with an EVT America Electric Trike, making those stylized five-spoke rims actually move. But that's only half of it. He plans to power the display with an iPhone 3GS and use it to render a sort of halcyon 16-bit view of the world ahead, with every road a 64-color dream lined with palm trees. A recent video showing off some of the tech is embedded below, and while we think this is about as likely to turn a wheel as aTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet is to travel in time, we'll certainly be first in line with four quarters if it ever does.

Avatars Can Surreptitiously And Negatively Affect User In Video Games, Virtual Worlds

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2009) — Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one's self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user's thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor.

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