Well it has finally happened. A car that drives itself has been introduced to the mass market. Honda is now selling a completely automatic car in England. The auto uses a camera system that allows it to stay between the white lines on a road. It also features radar that will allow it to maintain the correct distance with any vehicle in front of it. If it has to, it is capable of coming to a full stop and starting again. If you take you hands off the driver's wheel for more than ten seconds, the car will stop. This is a safety feature for those of us that are prone to fall asleep when we have nothing to do. I am not sure that I could ever trust a vehicle like this, after all, it must be computer driven and all one would need is a glitch. Not only that, I don't like the idea that it relies on those white lines painted on the road. I would always have the fear that some jerk would come out at night and for a laugh, paint the lines in such a way that they would lead off the road. I think that a better system would be implants in the roadsides that would guide the car. Who knows, this may come to pass. This is a subject that bears more observation.

Did you hear about the company that came out with that toy robot that was so good, that it is now coming out with a robot dinosaur that will have thousands of movements and be very life like? You will be able to upgrade it off of the internet when new movements are available. It is said to work off of a memory card. When I read the review it stated that it walks around the house, scratches itself, yawns and performs thousands of natural movements. Here is the best part, the price. It is expected to sell for only $200.00. No wonder Sony discontinued its robot dog. Ugobe Pleo, as it is known, will have 38 sensors, 14 motors and 8 processors. Quite a bit of kit for the money. It will be able to detect light, touch, sound and motion. It is going to be very lifelike according to the company, with very fluid motion and flexible skin. I think I want one!

The U.S. is going to unleash a robot, in the future, that will swim underwater to Spain. The interesting part of the story is that it will have no propeller or exhaust system. It will simply move up and down to generate forward motion. It looks like a small plane and will have many batteries that will shift forward and backward to assist the swimming motion.

Anyone with a cell phone can be tracked if it is on. That is a bold statement, but a true one. Not only that, but, it doesn't take much of an investment to do it. The means are available to anyone, not just big agencies. All it requires is a kit that costs about $100.00 and about $6.00 per month for a data plan. This allows the GPS satellite to find you. It will not track your exact location but will come within about 100 yards, close enough for government work as they say. There goes the rest of our privacy, maybe it would be a good idea to shut off your phone if you are going somewhere that you don't want anyone to know about. Daddy, were you just at the race track?

I just saw an interesting fact in a program on the history channel. Julius Caesar had decided to invade Germania. No Roman army had ever done it before. The reason was the Rhine River was in the way. Caesar took 8 legions, 40,000 men, marched up to the rivers edge then built a heavy bridge across the Rhine in only 10 days and marched his entire army across it. The Germans had at least 400,000 men but were so scared when they saw what he had done that they left him unopposed. He marched around for about a week and a half, then left Germania, disassembling the bridge behind him. He had made a statement to the Germans that they would not soon forget. The statement was that Caesar and Rome had the technology to go anywhere. This was ancient technology at it's best.

In World War II, some of the famous liberty ships were built out of cement. Today there is talk of a cheap submarine that will be made of cement. It is not meant for sea voyages The sub will lay in wait near the coast of the country it is protecting and if any hostile vessels, including other submarines come near, it will rise behind them and launch its torpedoes which could be the new 200 mph jobs invented by Russia. Who said that subs have to be expensive? I was thinking that these subs may not even have to look like subs. They might just look like large rocks sitting on the sea floor.

Robotic operations are becoming more and more common in hospitals lately. Your average hospital is becoming a high tech center with machines of every type on location. Computers have made it possible, for doctors that are thousands of miles apart, to consult on X-Rays that all can view at the same time. The robotic operations are said to be much more precise and in some cases require smaller openings. Right now these operations are still directed by a human. The way it works is that a doctor's hand movements outside the patients body are converted, by the computer, to movements of instruments inside the patient. Look for vast improvements in this system in the near future.

The new camera pill is quite an invention. It is completely wireless and passes out of your body. It will travel through your small intestine and take pictures as it travels. This allows doctors to see the upper GI tract which is not reached by traditional endoscopy.

The world's oldest rock, 4.4 billion years old, is going on display. I think that they should call this the world's oldest rock found to date. Who knows what other older rocks lurk in other places? Anyhow it is very tiny being the width of two hairs. It is made of zircon crystal and was found in Australia. Because of this find, scientists now believe that the early earth was much cooler than first suspected. They also believe now that water formed much sooner than thought and so did life. Maybe we will find out someday that we populated Mars and then came back to earth.