DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
PICTURE: Hipchips Twitter page.
• A café serving just potato chips and dips (called crisps and dips in the country where it’s based – the UK) has opened in London. Hipchips sources unusual potato varieties, like Highland Black, and accompanies its chips with various fancy dips (and there’s also a range of craft beers and wine). The restaurant is the latest innovative eatery to open in the city – other recently opened specialist eating establishments include the Cereal Killer Café, dedicated to breakfast cereals, and the Melt Room, which specializes in cheese toasties.
• Time is running out to enter NASA’s Space Poop Challenge. The US space agency is looking for solutions to deal with waste of astronauts while in their spacesuits and are offering a $US30,000 prize to whoever can come up with a new system inside the spacesuit that “collects human waste for up to 144 hours and routes it away from the body, without the use of hands”. They say that the current use of diapers “doesn’t provide a healthy/protective option longer than one day” – given astronauts can spend 10 hours in the suits at take-off and landing and up to six days should something go catastrophically wrong, the new system needs to work for six days or 144 hours and must, of course, take into account the microgravity in which the astronauts work. So get thinking!
• Can you bully a robot (or more particularly a driverless car)? Dietmar Exler, chief executive of Mercedes-Benz, thinks so. He’s recently told a motoring conference in LA that driverless cars are likely to be the victims of human bullies on the road and that while robot-driven cars will be compelled to be law-abiding, human drivers are likely to take advantage of that, cutting in, for example, in front a driverless car rather than a human-driven car because they know it will be compelled to give way. While it’s been suggested driverless car systems could be made more human in their approach – perhaps bending the rules a little – Mr Exler says he doubts authorities would allow such a stand.
