Get Yer Bread and Milk From Kroger’s Cute New Delivery Robot The R1 can carry 12 large grocery bags, what if someone orders 13 bags worth of stuff? Ask most of the people developing autonomous vehicles how robo-cars will change the world, and most will say safety—more than a million people die on the road every year, and self-driving cars could prevent some of those deaths. Some might say smarter cars can battle congestion. Ask Dave Ferguson, though, and he’ll pitch the idea that this technology could make moving about so efficient and affordable that transportation becomes effectively free. But first, before the zeroes and ones can do any of that, they may bring you your groceries. If you shop at Kroger, that is, and are cool with a Lilliputian pseudo-car pulling into your driveway all by itself. Ferguson is a co-founder of Nuro, the startup making that robot, and […]

Man trolls festival-goers by selling hot dog water for £30 – and people actually bought it While food trends may get a little weird from time to time, we can’t help feeling a little grossed out by this one. A man sold bottles of hot dog water for $38. WOW When it comes to food and drink, it’s always nice to try new things. But just because something says it’s packed with health benefits – does that mean we should buy it? That’s the point an artist from Canada attempted to make this week at a street festival in Vancouver. Hot Dog Water CEO Douglas Bevans set up a booth at the Car-Free Day Festival and started selling bottles of unfiltered hot dog water for $38 (just under £30). Yep, you read that right, hot dog water – that’s water that has been used to cook hot dogs in. The […]

CERN Begins ‘High-Luminosity’ Upgrade for Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been churning out groundbreaking science ever since it went into operation in 2010. The giant particle accelerator, perched on the border of France and Switzerland, has gotten several upgrades over the years, and a new project is just getting underway now. CERN has broken ground on the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which will result in more particle collisions and more data to help scientists unravel the mysteries of the universe. The LHC operates by accelerating protons around the 16.8-mile (27-kilometer) ring using cryogenically cooled, superconducting magnets. Some of those protons smack into each other in the detectors at nearly the speed of light. The exotic matter that spills out is short-lived, but the decay products can tell us about the fundamental laws of the universe. With more collisions, you can gather more data on those particles. That’s […]

Astronomers Are Watching a Black Hole Tear a Star Apart in Another Galaxy Astronomers detected a massive outpouring of energy from a distant galaxy 10 years ago, which would usually mean a supernova event — the death of a star. The galaxy in question is actually two galaxies colliding, so the region known as Arp 299 is rich with supernovae. However, the signal changed in unexpected ways over the last decade, and scientists now believe this is a result not of a supernova, but of a star being gobbled up by a black hole. In a new study, astronomers claim a star with around two solar masses came apart at the seams when it encountered a black hole with the mass of 20 suns. The original event (about 150 million light years distant) showed up in the sky to be detected by the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. […]