Blog Heap o' Transport Links

A Russian and US space crew denied on Friday that new rules forbid them from sharing toilets and food in orbit, hailing their work as the "best partnership" in human history.

Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government help, so business owners and residents on Hawaii's Kauai island pulled together and completed a $4 million repair job to a state park -- for free.

Dog-crazy Americans will soon be able to buy a pet-friendly car with a cushioned dog bed in the trunk, fitted with a built-in water bowl and fan and a ramp to help less agile dogs climb in.

Shortly after a report indicated Chinese and Russian hackers were accused of targeting the U.S. power grid infrastructure, Chinese officials have vehemently denied the accusations. "The intrusion doesn't exist at all," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said during a press conference. "We hope that the concerned media will prudently deal with some groundless remarks, especially those concerning accusations against China."

What happened next on the March 28 flight depends on who is talking. Correa said he ran straight to the business class bathroom. "I had no choice," he said in a telephone interview. Correa said flight attendant Stephanie Scott put up her arm and blocked his entry into business class, according to an FBI affidavit. Correa then grabbed her arm to keep his balance. Scott, however, said Correa stormed up the aisle and insisted to use the bathroom. She said she lightly placed her arm on his shoulder and asked him to move back. Correa then grabbed her right arm, pulled it downward and twisted it, she told an FBI agent.

GM and Segway unveiled the Project PUMA, a two-seat rickshaw minus a rick that uses the Segway's electric systems to glide around on two wheels. Capable of carrying 700 pounds in a frame about half the size of a Smart car, the PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) can spin on a pin and "bows" to let passengers in and out.

One person is reported dead and several others injured after a car ran into an IHOP restaurant in northwest Oklahoma City.... [24yo woman] was turning into the restaurant parking lot when she hit a curb, struck a parking block and crashed into the building. The reported dead man was in a booth inside the restaurant.... driving under the influence manslaughter.

Opening a car trunk or controlling a home air conditioner could become just a wish away with Honda's new technology that connects thoughts inside a brain with robotics. Honda Motor Co. has developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements—moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating. Honda succeeded in analyzing such thought patterns, and then relaying them as wireless commands for Asimo, its human-shaped robot.

The Bartlesville is divided into 2 distinct members, referred to as Upper and Lower Bartlesville. Upper Bartlesville sand thickness is 9.6 net feet and covers the complete area. Lower Bartlesville averages 24.7 net feet and covers the same area.

In a law enforcement first, Ohio cops this month arrested a man for drunk driving on a motorized bar stool.

In calling its new family sedan the "Model S," Tesla likely wants to evoke the Model T of days gone by. The implication is that this new electric car will be accessible to mainstream Americans -- and that it will radically change the way people travel from one place to another.

State Senate leaders expect a vote next week on a bill allowing two coal-fired power plants in southwest Kansas. They also said Friday they expect the measure to go to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who vetoed three similar bills last year.

the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. ... A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event — a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun. ... an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

IT solution providers in Alaska are watching the skies with trepidation as the ash fall from Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano begins to creep closer to the downtown Anchorage region. ... Volcanic ash is known for its ability to wreak havoc on desktops, servers, and basically any type of IT infrastructure that has moving parts. And it also contains silica sand, a conductive material that's capable of destroying circuit boards....

Confronted with orbiting junk again, NASA ordered the astronauts aboard the linked space station and shuttle Discovery to move out of the way of a piece of debris Sunday. Discovery's pilots fired their ship's thrusters to reorient the two spacecraft and thereby avoid a small piece from a 10-year-old Chinese satellite rocket motor that was due to pass uncomfortably close during Monday's planned spacewalk.

Woburn, Mass.-based Terrafugia Inc., founded four years ago by MIT graduates, reported today that its Transition "roadable" aircraft completed its first flight at Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, N.Y. on March 5 with retired U.S. Air Force Col. Phil Meteer at the controls. The short flight was confined to the expanse of the runway, but it was enough to allow the company to test the Transition's stability and controllability.

NASA kept close tabs on an old piece of space junk Monday that threatened to come too close to the international space station, as the shuttle Discovery raced toward the orbiting outpost for a 220-mile-high linkup. Experts initially warned that the debris from a Soviet satellite that broke up in 1981 could veer within a half-mile of the space station. But later in the morning, they said it appeared that the small piece of junk—about 4 inches in size—might remain at a safe distance.

BUCKFIELD - A Sunday afternoon motorcycle ride to shake off winter's cabin fever took a serious turn for a Hartford rider after he was knocked off his bike by a wild turkey. ... flew directly into his chest ... "That's like hitting a bowling ball at 45 miles per hour," said Trooper Corey Huckins of the Maine State Police.

The piece of orbital space junk that forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station on Thursday was bigger than originally reported.... The object, identified as a piece of rocket engine that flew in 1993, was about 5 inches (12.7 cm) in diameter, not .35 inches (0.89 cm).

New England travelers should benefit from faster, more frequent and safer train travel with an extra $1.3 billion pumped into the long-struggling Amtrak, half of it directed to the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, the Obama administration announced yesterday.

The near-hit of space junk Thursday was a warning fired shot across the bow of the international space station, experts said. There's likely more to come in the future.

New York and other Northeast states lag in dropping landlines. Surprisingly, Oklahoma and Utah lead in going wireless

BY STRIPPING the funding for the nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, President Obama has succeeded in killing the contentious project that remains unfinished 22 years after Congress selected the site. He compounds the error by not offering an alternative. If the president's vision for a clean energy future is to be believed or is to come to fruition, nuclear energy must be a part of the mix, and the safe disposal of its radioactive waste must be given more serious consideration. [This president has no such vision.]

An innovative and easily implemented technique in which nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces could soon open doors to dramatic improvements in the data storage capacity of electronic media.... "The density achievable with the technology we've developed could potentially enable the contents of 250 DVDs to fit onto a surface the size of a quarter...."

A couple drove 170 kilometres (100 miles) from South Africa's famous Kruger National Park with a highly venomous spitting cobra in their car ... Gordon Parratt, 69, felt the 85-centimetre (33-inch) long snake wind itself around his leg while he was driving. At first he thought an insect had brushed his leg and swiped it away, but when he looked down he saw the snake next to his left foot.... "Fortunately I'm not the panicky type. My wife immediately put her feet up on the dashboard...."

A 26-year-old passenger on board an American Airlines jet from Charlotte to Dallas opened a door and slid down an inflatable emergency chute Tuesday as the aircraft waited to taxi to its gate at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

An asteroid of a similar size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed close past Earth on Monday.... 2009 DD45, estimated to be between 21 and 47 meters (68 and 152 feet) across, raced by at 1344 GMT on Monday.... The gap was just 72,000 kilometers (44,750 miles), or a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon and only twice the height of satellites in geosynchronous orbit

...60 percent of the world's citizens own a cell phone ... due in large part to cell phone growth in poor, developing countries. ... By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscriptions globally, compared with roughly 1 billion in 2002, ... Approximately 23 percent of the population uses the Internet, up from 11 percent in 2002. Still, poor countries are far less likely to surf the Net....

China crashed a lunar probe into the moon Sunday.... Images released by the Chinese government show that the lunar satellite circled the Earth three times before traveling toward the moon and circling it twice before its crash. The government said the Chang'e I was controlled remotely and began to reduce speed about 45 minutes before the crash. Images show the lunar satellite breaking apart on impact. The deliberate crash of the lunar satellite aimed to give China experience for a moon landing in two years and eventual launch of an unmanned lunar rover.... China hopes to collect soil and stone samples from the moon by 2017 and send a manned rover to the moon by 2020...

Printing presses normally used to make Australian dollar bills produced solar power cells in a trial near Melbourne last week. The giant machines arranged and stamped flexible solar panels onto plastic film.

The space agency's first carbon dioxide-monitoring satellite took off on a rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this morning, but after blasting through the Earth's atmosphere it fell short of its orbiting height and plummeted back towards the sea.

Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, has been officially announced, and promises to change, among other things, the one problem keeping Linux from world domination: the poop-colored desktop theme.

In the four years since a Texas woman was killed when a piece of concrete fell from an interstate bridge and crashed through her windshield, more than two dozen other people have filed similar claims against the state. Although no deaths were reported, information provided to The Associated Press under an open records request shows 26 people have filed claims against the state involving falling concrete since Osborn's fatal accident in June 2004.

A commercial satellite owned by a U.S. company was destroyed in a collision with a defunct Russian military satellite in what NASA said was the first such accident in orbit, raising new concerns about the dangers of space debris. The crash, which happened Tuesday in low-earth orbit, involved one of the satellites owned by closely held Iridium Satellite LLC and a crippled Russian military satellite that apparently stopped functioning years ago.... The collision created two large clouds of debris floating roughly 480 miles above Siberia, and prompted space scientists and engineers to assess the likelihood of further collisions....

…accessing the names and Social Security numbers of 45,000 employees and retirees. The agency said in a statement Monday that two of the 48 files on the breached computer server contained personal information about employees and retires who were on the FAA's rolls as of the first week of February 2006. … not connected to the operation of the air traffic control system….

Three Toledo-area people were killed in a chain-reaction crash at a collision scene on I-475/U.S. 23 near the Ohio Turnpike just before daybreak Thursday, and another person was critically injured when she jumped off a bridge to avoid being struck by a vehicle

Dr. Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is an American physicist and a former NASA astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman—and then-youngest American—to enter space. In 1987 she left NASA to work at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Drivers better buckle up or pay the price: More cash-strapped states want to give law enforcement officers the authority to pull over motorists just for not wearing their seat belts. More than a dozen states that are considering making the switch to primary seat-belt enforcement laws need to do so before July to be eligible for millions in federal money.

Is it a car? Is it a plane? Actually it's both. The first flying automobile, equally at home in the sky or on the road, is scheduled to take to the air next month. If it survives its first test flight, the Terrafugia Transition, which can transform itself from a two-seater road car to a plane in 15 seconds, is expected to land in showrooms in about 18 months' time.

"Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents," writes Baker in a statement released with the report, "the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems." According to the report, the U.S. has grown so dependent on modern technologies without respect of what the sun can and has done, that it's risking major communications, finance, transportation, government and even emergency services meltdowns.

Monday's death-defying jet-pack flight across Colorado's Royal Gorge was only the beginning, says an official with the company behind the feat. Eric Scott of Jet Pack International (Jet P.I.) used a standard hydrogen peroxide-fueled jet pack to get across the 1,250-foot-deep gorge south of Denver, breaking his own record by traveling 1,500 feet horizontally. But his entire flight lasted only 20 seconds. The maximum flight time for a hydrogen-peroxide pack is about 45 seconds, though one company in California has recently extended that to 75 seconds by mixing in a little kerosene.

Internet service providers have not focused much effort on rolling out Web connectivity to some of America's more rural areas. IBM and International Broadband Electric Communications plan to address that by providing service via existing power lines. The project could finally bring the Web to more remote locations, but the technology is unlikely to soon become a competitor to more traditional means of Internet service.

A British engineer has invented a fan-powered flying car - and to prove the Skycar works, he's off to Africa in it