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With a reported tie-up between Google’s self-driving car efforts and the automaker Ford, the era of autonomous vehicles is getting closer. The impact is likely to shake up the balance of power in the global auto industry and among the technology elite. At stake is nothing less than trillions of dollars.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) – X-ray vision, a comic book fantasy for decades, is becoming a reality in a lab at MIT.

A group of researchers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dina Katabi has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements.

Researchers say the technology will be able to help health care providers and families keep closer tabs on toddlers and the elderly, and it could be a new strategic tool for law enforcement and the military.

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Can there be any doubt any more that colonizing, at minimum, the rest of the solar system is an existential species imperative!?


Most studies of potential Earth-smashers focus on objects in the asteroid belt roughly between Mars, Earth’s outside neighbour, and Jupiter on its other flank, said the researchers.

But they noted that the discovery in the last two decades of hundreds of giant comets dubbed centaurs, albeit with much larger orbits, requires expanding the list of potential hazards.

These balls of ice and dust, typically 50–100 kilometres (31−62 miles) wide, have unstable, elliptical orbits that start way beyond Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun.

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