It's been nearly a full month since the Costa Concordia ran aground just off the Tuscan island of Giglio, and after two weeks of delays salvage workers yesterday began pumping operations aimed at recovering most of the nearly two million litres of fuel aboard the badly listing Italian cruise liner. Roughly 84 per cent of that fuel is stuck in 15 large tanks, and pumping that volume out of the ship will likely take another month - and that's with the pumps running around the clock.
A survey into consumer attitudes towards electric cars in the United States has found that by far the biggest barrier to a purchase is maximum trip distance, but also found a rather large percentage of people are worried that the vehicles are actually more dangerous than standard cars.
In this economy, a job is a job. And while we await the day that we can hire our robot companions to handle our household duties, humanoid semi-celeb Geminoid-F is exploring other possibilities at a Takashimaya department store in Tokyo. Here, Geminoid is blazing a trail for androids everywhere by taking a job in a storefront window to see how the humans passing by respond.
After years of playing such numbers extremely close to the vest, Google today released figures spelling out exactly how much electricity the company's massive computing resources consume. Its data centres continuously draw 260 million watts - roughly a quarter the output of a nuclear power plant, says the NYT-to keep services like Gmail, search, Google Ads, and YouTube up and running around the clock and around the globe.
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