This week marks two years since the end of a lawsuit over who had the world record in car sales! Not that we're short on stories these days about people disputing numbers. Plus: if you want a calmer story, how about this one about an artist who makes ornate sculptures from apples?
Robot roadside assistance? Toyota has applied for a patent for a system where self-driving drones could pull up to vehicles and give them some gas - or, if it runs on electricity, give it a charge. Plus: when you need to get a donor organ from one part of Italy to another, what do you do? Turn to a Lamborghini, of course.
Back in the days when auto workers spray painted new vehicles, excess paint would harden and accumulate into a substance that looked like colorful gemstones. Jewelers have been making works of art out of "fordite" ever since. Plus: ever wanted to make a bread bowl that looks like your own face? Now you can!
There was a story out of Italy where a driver got a ticket for driving 437 miles per hour. Since that's almost three times as fast as the car could legitimately go, it's believed to have been a malfunction of a local speed camera. Plus: the creations of cabinet maker Henk Verhoeff aren't malfunctioning, they're meant to be, as the artist put it, "broken and weird."
The Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stand in Paris for 20 years... but experiments in "wireless telegraphy" helped convince the powers that be to keep the tower in place. Plus: this gallery of the weirdest-looking cars to ever roll off the assembly line is maybe not the aesthetic equal of the Eiffel Tower, but it sure is fun.
That doesn't sound good.
On this day in 1942, the patent was issued for a car that was to be (at least partly) made from soybeans. And it was the idea of none other than Henry Ford. Plus: Steven Paul Judd is an Oklahoma-based artist of Kiowa/Choctaw descent, and last month he made a portrait of Sitting Bull using just over 20,000 black and white dice.
Dental history is, shall we say, complicated. Fortunately we have all sorts of ways to minimize pain today, but none may be as exciting as those used by Edgar "Painless" Parker, a dentist who would distract his patients by putting on a vaudeville show as he worked. Plus: V2P technology could help us keep cars and pedestrians from crashing into each other.
All kinds of pop culture can lead to trends in baby names, but there’s research that shows that when a hit song has climbed up the pop charts, the same name starts climbing the list of baby names. Plus: good news out of the Consumer Electronics Show for drivers who forget their sunglasses. It's an interactive smart car visor.
You’ve heard about making cars smarter, but what about smarter intersections? Cornell researchers find that making intersections more autonomous could help get self-driving cars where they want to go more efficiently. Plus: on the anniversary of the last day of the last Apollo mission to the moon, how about a trip to the Museum of the Moon, now visiting Philadelphia?
