Extreme tech- extreme

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  Self-driving forklift Ray brings automatic parking to the luxury market July 30, 2014 at 4:24 pm

  Dusseldorf Airport in Germany is trying out a new robot parking system that uses self-driving forklifts to increase parking efficiency by up to 60%.
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  Regeneration therapy from Biplastiq can rejuvenate tissue with light July 30, 2014 at 3:17 pm

  A new company known as Biplastiq plans to offer a radical new medical treatment. The technology uses genetically-transformed mitochondria that can be activated with light to provide additional energy where cells need it most.
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  The secret world of power generation, and the arrival of Earth-spanning super grids July 30, 2014 at 12:37 pm

  A long, long time ago — well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact — electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla’s invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world’s first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.
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  This robot needs just a few seconds to learn to walk again after you break its legs July 30, 2014 at 10:14 am

  Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven’t read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they’ll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.
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  2014 Mitsubishi Outlander review: Proof that good tech doesn’t always make for a good car July 29, 2014 at 12:42 pm

  This compact SUV has adaptive cruise control, torque vectoring and three rows of seats. It still feels like a last-generation car but the pricing is competitive and the tech is OK. This isn’t a bad car, but there are better compact SUVs on the market right now.
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  Sewing an invisibility cloak with a needle made of light July 29, 2014 at 11:32 am

  Needles made of lasers are being used at the University of Cambridge to assemble nanoparticles into larger segments that could one day be used to make an honest-to-goodness cloaking device.
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  Mars rover Opportunity breaks longest off-Earth driving record, finally beating the speed freak Russians July 29, 2014 at 10:28 am

  NASA’s Opportunity rover, Curiosity’s diminutive forebear that has been trundling across Mars for over 10 years, has finally broken the world record for the longest distance driven on another planet. Since landing on the Red Planet in January 2004, Opportunity has now driven a grand total of 25 miles (40 kilometers), breaking the previous off-Earth distance record of 24.2 miles, which was held by the Russian lunar rover Lunokhod 2.
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  Mysterious fast radio bursts from outer space: Astronomers baffled, admit they could be alien in origin July 29, 2014 at 8:36 am

  Since 2001, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia has been picking up mysterious, unidentified bursts of energy that astronomers have since dubbed ‘fast radio bursts.’ At first, because no other telescope in the world had ever seen these bursts, it was assumed that these FRBs were probably just glitches in the telescope’s electronics — but now, 13 years later, a telescope on the other side of the planet in Puerto Rico has detected an FRB. No one knows what’s causing these FRBs, but it’s almost certainly something very exotic, like an intelligent alien civilization.
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  What happens if you get hit by the main beam of a particle accelerator like the LHC? July 28, 2014 at 2:04 pm

  I don’t know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I’ve always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a scientist was accidentally hit by the main particle beam? Would the scientist explode in the style of beam weapons in Star Trek? Would the beam bore a hole clean through the scientist’s chest? Or maybe the beam would do nothing at all and pass through the scientist harmlessly? Well, fortunately (unfortunately?) we don’t have to guess, as this exact scenario actually happened to Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, way back in 1978.
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  Scientists are about to use supernova cosmic rays to peer inside the most dangerous room in the world: Fukushima July 28, 2014 at 11:52 am

  Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be using one of the universe’s most energetic fundamental particles to image the destruction inside Fukushima’s reactor core.

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