Inventor Creates Wheels That Let Cars Roll in Any Direction

    Omnidirectional wheels have been around for a while, but they are mostly used on utility(实用的) vehicles like forklifts. London-based inventor William Liddiard has created a special set of all-around wheels that can be bolted on to any car, allowing it to move in any direction, spin 360 degrees and slide into a parallel park with ease.

    "Unlike other all-around capable wheels, my wheels do not require the vehicle to be built around them. This is a world first bolt-on application for anything with wheels." Liddiard wrote in the description of a You Tube video he uploaded to show how his invention works on an old Toyota Echo. "They are stronger, faster, and more accurately controlled than previous technology. They can take a beating. The tires can have the same build characteristics (siping, grooves, rubber compounds etc.) as regular tires. Now you can drive in all directions, and tum on the spot, when needed."

    While the "Liddiard Wheels" shown in the video are just proof of concept prototypes(原型机), they seem to work as described by the inventor. His car can be seen spinning in place and sliding from one side to the other as the tires move under the power of 24,000 pounds of torque (扭矩) applied directly to them.

    William is now hoping that the power of social media will help him get his invention out there and eventually team up with a company willing to help him improve the wheels and eventually bring them to the market.

    "Will a set of wheels make sideward parking an easy thing? Yeah, I'm pretty sure these things will be in high demand if they ever end up on the market." the inventor said confidently.

    The weather is very important to farmers. The calendar might say “August”， but the weather's more like October. For some farmers the cool weather is a good thing. For others, it's a cause for concern.

    At Apple Hill, the cooler weather was giving the Boeger Winery a chance to concentrate on bottling instead of picking. “Things were really maturing, it has just been a welcome relief to have more time to prepare.” said Greg Boeger of Boeger Winery.

    But down in the Delta, the earlier hot weather has them two weeks ahead of schedule. Their harvest actually started on Tuesday, and this cooling trend is a worry. There have been no problems yet, but for each of the last two years heavy rain right after Labor Day was a problem, one that Don Pylman would not like to see repeated.

    “If it doesn't start raining, we're in good shape，” said Pylman. “If the sun comes out and clears up we can get right back to work, but if we do get rain, the rots will start.”

    The kind of grape makes a difference as well. Thin­skinned grapes like the chardonnay variety are much more sensitive to rain than some of the others. They're also more difficult to dry off.

    During the past Spring Festival, many children may have received red packets from their families. But Xing Pu, a 40-year-old economist, is asking the government to give red packets to every Chinese citizen.

    Xing suggested the government give out 1,000 yuan to each Chinese since the government income has increased rapidly in recent years. He said his suggestion would allow everyone to directly enjoy the fruits of the country's economic success, help the lower-income groups deal with rising prices and increase consumption (消费) around the country.

    Recent years have seen the government carry out a series of pro-poor (扶贫) and pro-rural (惠农) policies, including increasing spending on public healthcare and calling off the agricultural tax. But the lower-income group still needs more help while being hit hard by an 11-year high in prices and recent snowstorms.

    Xing said while making the draft, he has borrowed many ideas from practices in countries like the United States and Singapore. Earlier this year, the governments of the two nations offered money to their citizens as the result of a surplus in government income. As for in China, "We can even encourage the rich to donate their 1,000 yuan red packet to the poor," said Xing.

    Although Xing's suggestion has gained wide support among ordinary Chinese on the Internet, many other economists criticized it as unpractical. Even Xing himself admitted he made the suggestion without any careful calculation. But they agreed with Xing's point that the growing economic pie should be shared among the people.

    "To better use the increase of money, handing out money is not a solution that holds good for all time. It could be better to improve the public service or cut the price of energy used in daily life," said QiaoXinsheng, an economic professor.

    The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the earth, is even today largely unexplored. Until about a century ago, the deep ocean floor was completely inaccessible and hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and in the case of intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a strange environment to humans, in some way, as fighting and remote as the outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks for over a century, the first detailed global study of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1969, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project(DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill very deep waters, taking samples of rocks from the ocean floor.

    The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, it sailed 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 samples of rocks around the world. Those samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to make out what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics (构造学) and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes.

    The sample of rocks drilled by the Glomar Challenger has also provided a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years. The information of past climatic change can be used to predict the future climate.

    Rivers are earthly arteries(要道) for the nutrients, deposits and freshwater that sustain healthy, diverse ecosystems. Their influence extends in multiple dimensions—not only along their length but below­ground to aquifers(蓄水层) and periodically into nearby floodplains.

    They also provide vital services for people by fertilizing agricultural land and feeding key fisheries and by acting as transportation corridors. But in efforts to ease ship passage, protect communities from flooding, and draw off water for drinking and irrigation, humans have increasingly constrained and broken these crucial water ways. “We try to control rivers as much as possible,” says Gunther Grill, a hydrologist at McGill University.

    In new research published in May in Nature, Grill and his colleagues analyzed the barriers to 12 million total kilometers of rivers around the world. The team developed an index(指数) that evaluates six aspects of connectivity—from physical fragmentation (by dams, for example) to flow regulation (by dams or levees) to water consumption—along a river's various dimension. Rivers whose indexes meet a certain threshold(临界值) for being largely able to follow their natural patterns were considered free­flowing.

    The researchers found that among rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers (which tend to be some of those most important to human activities), only 37 percent are not blocked along their entire lengths. Most of them are in areas with a minimal human presence, including the Amazon and Congo basins and the Arctic. On the contrary, most rivers shorter than 100 kilometers appeared to flow freely—but the data on them are less comprehensive, and some barriers might have been missed. Only 23 percent of the subset of the longest rivers that connect to the ocean are uninterrupted. For the rest, human infrastructure is starving estuaries(河口) and deltas (such as the Mississippi Delta) of key nutrients. The world's estimated 2.8 million dams are the main cause, controlling water flow and trapping deposits.

    The new research could be used to better understand how proposed dams, levees and other such projects might impact river connectivity, as well as where to remove these fixtures to best restore natural flow. It could also help inform our approach to rivers as the climate changes, says Anne Jefferson, a hydrologist at Kent State University, who was not involved in the work. Existing infrastructure, she says, “has essentially been built to a past climate that we are not in anymore and are increasingly moving away from.”

On a daily basis, the digital expanse witnesses an exchange of over two billion pictorial representations. Although imagery offers an entertaining and articulate avenue for online interaction, the process of digesting and generating such content presents formidable obstacles for individuals who are devoid of sight or are enduring profound visual impairments. Given the reality that there are more than 39 million individuals who are sightless, and an excess of 246 million who are grappling with severe visual limitations, a significant cohort may perceive themselves as alienated from the discourse that revolves around photographic content on the Internet. Scholars hailing from Harvard University are endeavoring to construct technological solutions that would enable the visually impaired populace to partake in the appreciation of photographic imagery with the same zest as their sighted counterparts.

The advent of automated descriptive text represents a groundbreaking innovation that engenders a narrative depiction of a photograph by leveraging the latest advancements in the field of object recognition technology. Individuals who rely on auditory output devices on their digital gadgets will now be presented with an enumeration of elements that a photograph might encapsulate as they navigate through online images. Previously, those utilizing auditory output devices were limited to hearing solely the nomenclature of the individual who disseminated the photograph, succeeded by the designation "photo" upon encountering a pictorial piece. However, the introduction of automated descriptive text now allows for a more elaborate portrayal of the contents of a photograph. For example, an individual might now perceive an auditory description such as "a visual scene comprising three individuals, exhibiting expressions of joy, in an outdoor setting."

This capability is made possible through the object recognition technology developed by Harvard University, which is predicated on a computational framework that encompasses billions of variables and has been refined through exposure to millions of exemplars. Each stride in object recognition technology signifies the potential for researchers to render technological interfaces increasingly inclusive and accessible to a broader demographic. When individuals are interlinked, they are positioned to accomplish remarkable feats, both in isolation and as a collective entity, and such interconnection benefits all participants within the network.

The rollout of the automated descriptive text is initially targeting auditory output devices on mobile communication devices configured to English, with plans to extend this functionality to additional linguistic variants and technological platforms in the near term. Although this technology is still in its infancy, harnessing its current competencies to articulate the essence of photographs marks a pivotal advancement in the quest to furnish our community with visual impediments with the identical advantages and gratifications that the broader population derives from photographic imagery.