Jeff Bezos in space with a Blue Origin rocket Tuesday, July 20, 2021, nine days after billionaire Richard Branson's space trip aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the richest man in the world, also surrendered, accompanied 3 other passengers, in space aboard a capsule powered by the reusable New Shepard rocket from his company Blue Origin. Take-off took place from Launch Site One, the company's launch base located in West Texas, then the capsule was dropped at an altitude of 75 km to then slightly exceed 100 km in altitude, space border according to the International Aeronautical Federation. After 3 minutes of orbital flight, for a total flight of 11 minutes, the capsule made its return to Earth, braked by three parachutes and retro rockets. The New Shepard launcher also returned to a landing pad near the launch site.
Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Robots If there’s one place on Earth you can already get a glimpse of our robot-assisted future, it’s Japan. Routinely at the forefront of robotics research, the country has brought us some of the weirdest automatons, most lifelike androids, and cutest helper-bots. Nowhere is this more evident than at Nagasaki’s Henn-na Hotel, a hotel run by robots that opened this year. Walk into reception and a mechanised dinosaur will guide you through check-in; go to your room and a luggage bot will wheel your suitcase along beside you; get ready for bed and your own robot companion will turn out the lights. Henn-na Hotel CEO Hideo Sawada sells his offering as part of a utopian vision where robots take over manual labour so humans can turn their attention to more creative pursuits. Replacing staff with robots might reduce labour costs, but their appeal to visitors needs to last beyond novelty value. Motherboard host Ben Ferguson checks into the robot hotel in the first episode of our new travel series Voyager, made possible by travel tool KAYAK (http://www.kayak.co.uk/). The robot workers he meets are courteous and communicative, but can they emulate the human warmth of their flesh-and-blood counterparts? Could robots really be our future holiday companions, or do man and machine ultimately get lost in translation?
Urinating on a burning motorcycle Saturday January 20, 2024 in Santo Estêvão, Brazil, two men tried to extinguish a burning motorcycle with their own urine. The two men were riding a motorcycle on an avenue when the machine caught fire. They stopped and the passenger unbuttoned his fly, took out his lance and started spraying the bike with his urine, thinking he could put out the fire. The other man joined him to help, but to no avail, the motorcycle continued to burn.
Duo dance to Stayin’ Alive Funkanometry duo Jacksun Fryer and Carlow Rush dance in the streets of San Diego to the Bee Gees' song Stayin' Alive. Both men are from Vancouver Island in Canada. They competed on NBC's World of Dance in 2020 and America's Got Talent in 2022