trains

While many in the tech industry have their eyes on the cloud, Ester Dyson has set her sights on the stars.

The longtime tech pundit and investor on Tuesday said she is putting aside most of her day-to-day activities to undergo full-time astronaut training. She'll be a backup to another member of the tech industry, Charles Simonyi, who is set to make a second trip to the International Space Station next spring.

Dyson and Simonyi are indulging their cosmic interests under the auspices of Space Adventures, a company that arranges space flights for private citizens and in which Dyson … Read more

Shifting a fourth of U.S. freight from trucks to railroads by 2026 would spare each American an average of 41 hours of travel time, 79 gallons of fuel, and $985 in gas expenses each year, according to the seventh annual Congestion Relief Index on Tuesday.

"Freeing up space on our highways increases the flow of traffic and saves commuters' time, money, and gasoline," said Wendell Cox, who wrote the study, backed by the Association of American Railroads, and is the principal of market research firm Demographia.

In addition, the report estimated that more reliance on rail transport … Read more

The day is fast approaching when a holodeck in our living room may not be so far-fetched. First shown at CeBIT 2008, the Fitness@home virtual training system (PDF) is a first step toward a simulated reality facility, though we can hear Star Trek fans snorting at its baby steps. Still, this brainchild of Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) is the closest we've seen in conjuring up some virtual-reality wizardry to place you anywhere you fancy: Mt. Everest, if you plan to do some serious StairMaster climbing, National Geographic-style; the Beijing Olympics, if … Read more

Want to learn the secrets to creating beautiful HDR photographs? xTrain, a provider of online video training courses has announced a new high dynamic range (HDR) Mastery online video course by Photoshop expert Ben Willmore. HDR is the process of taking a sequence of exposures, allowing you to lighten the underexposed areas and darken the overexposed areas of a digital image to better simulate what the human eye would actually see.

The online course shows learners step-by-step the best practices of creating HDR photos. Students learn how to best choose subjects for HDR, such as watching for movement and clouds, … Read more

Anyone who saw Craver Brian Cooley's video of this bizarre vehicle at last year's Geneva Auto Show will notice that something is conspicuously absent from the photo above: There are no training wheels. The reason that the "MonoTracer" needs those is that it has only two wheels--something else that may not be entirely clear at an initial glance.

Though it may look like an anorexic car, this futuristic vehicle from Germany's Peraves is an enclosed motorcycle that is supposedly far more aerodynamic than its naked counterparts. Even so, when it's taking sharp corners on … Read more

I'm a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don't feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo's hardware, there's Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.

Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen "games" to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental … Read more

On the train in Japan, "green" does not refer to the environment. Nor to the color of money, as the extreme amounts necessary to buy "green" tickets there are colored in the generally neutral tones of 10,000 yen bills. Soon there will be "super-green" to take even more of your hard-earned gray.

East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) will introduce super-first class cars on a new extension to its bullet train routes in 2010. The luxuries, according to the Japanese paper Mainichi Shimbun, are to exceed the already comfy-looking green cars on the … Read more

Vacationing in Japan this week I accidentally rode on the world's first diesel-electric hybrid train in commercial service: The Kiha E200 running on the East Japan Railway's Koumi Line. Aside from being a new train, introduced in 2007, it seemed like any other, but the photographers camped out for a shot along the mountainous route told otherwise.

The train is a working prototype in use since July 2007 with the aim of gathering data for eventual mass production. Like a hybrid car, the diesel-powered engine is used during acceleration and the electric motor kicks in to maintain speed … Read more

The way things are going, someone might eventually try to cram a supercomputer into a Nintendo DS. Just as we were discussing a project to develop a synthesizer for the handheld, a new product comes along to teach Japanese calligraphy on it.

Bimoji Training (translation: Beautiful Letter Training) is being touted as a game, but we know better: It'll probably be co-opted by educators because it emphasizes teacher feedback. We just hope that the touch screen's sensitivity is up to par, lest it be an exercise in frustration (remember Palm's Graffiti?)

No matter how it works, though, … Read more