You can brag to your friends about the amazing weekend you had at the track all you want, but without a witness, you might as well be boasting about that monstrous fish that got away. So for the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, GM is including what it calls its Performance Data Recorder which overlays telemetry, speed, and location data over a 72oP video recording of everywhere you’ve driven—basically giving you instant replay of your hoonage so you can back up your bragging. Read more…
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The New Corvette Stingray Will Come With Built-In Instant Replay
cold fjord writes “Bexar Country in Texas has opened a new $2.3 million library called BiblioTech. It doesn’t have physical books, only computers and e-reader tablets. It is the first bookless public library system in the U.S. The library opened in an area without nearby bookstores, and is receiving considerable attention. It has drawn visitors from around the U.S. and overseas that are studying the concept for their own use. It appears that the library will have more than 100, 000 visitors by year’s end. Going without physical books has been cost effective from an architecture standpoint, since the building doesn’t have to support the weight of books and bookshelves. A new, smaller library in a nearby town cost $1 million more than Bexar Country’s new library. So far there doesn’t appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers. A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Discovered in 2009 by the MEarth project, researchers now have strong evidence that GJ 1214 b has an atmosphere “But now a team of astronomers led by UChicago’s Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean have detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble observations used 96 hours of telescope time spread over 11 months. This was the largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet. … The first spectra, which were obtained by Bean in 2010 using a ground-based telescope, suggested that the planet’s atmosphere either was predominantly water vapor or hydrogen-dominated with high-altitude clouds. … More precise Hubble observations made in 2012 and 2013 allowed the team to distinguish between these two scenarios. … The best explanation for the new data is that there are high-altitude clouds in the atmosphere of the planet, though their composition is unknown. Models of super-Earth atmospheres predict clouds could be made out of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide at the scorching temperatures of 450 degrees Fahrenheit found on GJ 1214b.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
