Google Maps helps reunite man with family 23 years after he was kidnapped on his way to kindergarten

Google Maps helps reunite man with family 23 years after he was kidnapped on his way to kindergarten

The Google Maps app is seen on an Apple iPhone in December 2012 in Fairfax, California. Luo Gang used Google Maps to pin point his family's house after a charity helped him locate the area of Sichuan to look in.
A Chinese man who was abducted on his way to kindergarten 23 years ago has finally found his family using Google Maps, according to reports in Chinese media.
Luo Gang was abducted in the Chinese province of Sichuan and taken to a far away city, about 1,600 kilometers away.
The heartwarming story has been brought to the public by Fujian province’s local news portal nhaidu.com.
Luo was just five years old when he disappeared from a small town near Guangan, southwestern Sichuan province. His parents searched for him but eventually gave up all hope and adopted a young girl.
Luo instead grew up hundreds of miles away in Sanming city in southeastern Fujian province.
While his adopted family were apparently loving, Luo was determined to find his birth parents. “Every day before I went to bed, I forced myself to re-live the life spent in my old home,” he told reporters.
Google Maps
Google MapsLuo Gang was abducted near the town of Guangan, in the Sichuan province (marked in blue) and was taken to the Sanming city in the Fujian province, (marked in pink) about 1,600 km away.
He drew a map of what he remembered about his home, including two distinctive bridges, and last October he uploaded it to Baby Come Home, a charity dedicated to locating missing children through the help of volunteers (it has been claimed that as many as 76,000 families lose a child in China each year).
A volunteer wrote back to Luo with some vital information — a family in the city of an area called “Yaojiaba” in the Sichuan county of Linshui had lost their child some 23 years ago. Could that child be Luo?
Luo used Google Maps to zoom in on Yaojiaba, and it was immediately clear to him this was his home.
“That’s it! That’s my home,” Luo reportedly shouted in tears.
Luo was finally reunited with his family — nhaidu.com has pictures of the tearful reunion. It is not clear if charges against his adopted family will be brought, the South China Morning Post reports, or if they played a direct role in his kidnapping.
Amazingly this isn’t the first time a lost child has used Google Maps to find their home decades after the fact.
Last year there was the incredible case of Saroo Munshi Khan, who got lost on the train when just five years old and ended up wandering the streets of Calcutta, miles away from his family. Twenty years later, having been adopted by an Australian family, Saroo was finally reunited with his mother after extensive searching for childhood memories on Google Maps.

Incredible Shade Illusion!

download this song on iTunes and Amazon http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/soul... http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_nos... Song name: Soul Switch Girl in the video: http://www.youtube.com/dxdutch Add me on Facebook (click the like button to add me on facebook) https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brussp... I put together a template of a smaller version of this design for you to download and try yourself. Give it a try, it really is amazing to see it happen right before your eyes. Here's the link to the template: http://i.imgur.com/Bf8xi.jpg brusspup t-shirts! http://brusspup.spreadshirt.com/ For me, this is still one of the most amazing illusions. The design is just so simple and yet the illusion is so amazing. This illusion has been around for a long time but always in the form of an image. It was created by MIT professor Edward H. Adelson. I wanted to take it from a flat piece of paper and turn it into a real, life sized illusion that I could interact with to demonstrate the effect. The illusion works because of the "shadow" that falls on the checkerboard. Lets think of the square that the shadow falls on. Now picture that the shadow doesnt exist, you would see a light colored square surrounded by the dark colored squares. But when the shadow falls on top of that light colored square, the shadow causes the shade to become darker but it also causes the surrounding darker squares to become darker. So within the shadow region the brightness and darkness of the squares are still relative to one another. But they are no longer relative to the squares that lie outside of the shadow. So if you were able to pick up the middle square and move it to one of the outside dark squares, they would be 2 different shades, But the trick is ..that when you move the square you are moving it WITH the shadow still printed on the square. So now you've moved it out of its relative area, outside of the shadow region (but with the shadow still printed on the square) ..to the area where it's the same shade as the "dark" square.

EU to scrap mobile roaming charges in favour of a single market

EU to scrap mobile roaming charges in favour of a single market


The European Commission voted on Tuesday in Brussels to end roaming fees for calls, texts and internet in favour of a single telecoms market across the continent.
Concrete details will be agreed upon and published within the next six weeks and the proposals could come into effect as soon as July 1, 2014.
The idea behind the reforms is to encourage a consolidation of European mobile network operators with greater eventual investment in the face of rapid growth in internet traffic.
Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda who is pushing for the changes, said: “I am glad that basic internet is now virtually everywhere in the EU, but we can’t get stuck playing yesterday’s game. The data shows that the biggest problem this year is the lack of investment in very fast networks, and a continuing lack of a real telecoms single market. The problem is clear and our response via a single telecoms market package will be too.”
In a speech last month she said of the reforms: “It’s how we can tell the world that Europe does “get” digital, it is how we can show voters that the EU does listen. Telecoms touches everything – and users are developing massive expectations of it.”
However, telecoms bosses believe their industry is being unfairly targeted, although commissioners argue that operators will gain in the long term as more customers use their phones, and particularly the internet, whilst abroad.
With roaming fees scrapped, officials believe the single market will allow foreign operators to compete for other countries’ customers. This could lead to alliances and mergers, similar to those seen in the airline industry.
Roaming tariffs in the EU have been an important project for the European Commission over the past few years. The cost of making and receiving calls, sending texts and using mobile internet have all decreased since 2007, when excessive charges were originally tackled.
The graph below shows how roaming tariffs have decreased.

Kanye West n'a pas trompé Kim K avec Leyla Ghobadi, c'était en 2011... Craig David (beaucoup trop) musclé sur Instagram...


PEOPLE - Retrouvez toute l'actualité des stars sur «20 Minutes»...

Vendredi 14 juin 2013
Kanye West a couché avec Leyla Ghobadi… en 2011
Soyez rassurés (ou déçus, lecteurs sans cœur): Kanye West n’a pas trompé Kim K. En tout cas pas avec Leyla Ghobadi. Reprenons. Mercredi, alerte rouge sur la planète people: Kanye West a trompé Kim, enceinte jusqu’au cou. C’est Leyla Ghobadi, un top model canadien qui l’affirme àStar Magazine. «Si j’avais été à la place de Kim et que j’allais accoucher, j’aurais voulu savoir», dit-elle. Indignation de Kanye, qui dément et dénonce «une triste tentative pour blesser deux personnes qui veulent juste vivre leur vie». Bon. Cela ne nous avançait pas beaucoup. On voyait mal Kanye lâcher «Comprenez-moi, vous avez vu la gueule de Kim en ce moment?»
Mais là-dessus, Leyla Ghobadi réagit, auprès du Sun, et ajoute une précision. Oui, elle a couché avec Kanye West trois fois, mais avant qu’il sorte avec Kim. Léger oubli, en effet! Leyla raconte l’avoir connu dans les coulisses d’un concert le 22 novembre 2011 à Montréal. «On s’est rencontrés parce que je connaissais des membres du groupe. On a fini par coucher ensemble à l’hôtel Thompson. Les deux jours suivants, je l’ai suivi dans ses concerts et on a à nouveau couché ensemble. C’était avant Kim Kardashian». Mais, et c’est là que vient le conseil d’amie, «Ce que je sais, c’est que Kanye est un Don Juan. On ne peut pas lui faire confiance. Il ne sera jamais fidèle à une seule femme». Le top ajoute qu’elle «ne peut pas croire à tout ce scandale», qui lui donne «des crises d'angoisse». 
Du coup, Kim K n’est pas au top de sa forme
Leyla n'est pas la seule à craquer. A en croire ces photos, Kim Kardashian est un peu au bout du rouleau. Pour que Miss Kardashian, alias la coquetterie incarnée -on a dit «coquette», pas «reine de la classe et du bon goût»- sorte sans maquillage et les traits aussi fatigués, c’est qu’elle a eu sa dose d’humiliation (merci Leyla Ghobadi) et de grossesse (allez baby Kimye, à toi de jouer).
Craig, il va falloir s’arrêter maintenant
Vous voyez ces magasins de boîtes de protéines, sur trois étages, qu'on trouve aux Etats-Unis? Craig David doit y passer pas mal de temps. Le chanteur de 32 ans vient de partager sur Instagram une photo de son torse hyper musclé, accompagnée d'un long commentaire/leçon de vie à ses fans. «Quand je sais qu’il y aura des moments où j’aurais envie de manger toutes les barres chocolatées du placard (…) je regarde cette photo qui me rappelle instantanément à l’ordre et me rappelle à quel point je me sens bien quand j’atteins mon objectif. Croyez-moi, ça marche!». Crois-nous, Craig, il faut s'arrêter là maintenant. Quatre boîtes de Kinder Bueno ne te feront pas de mal. 

Record de vitesse pour un hélicoptère hybride

Record de vitesse pour un hélicoptère hybride


Le démonstrateur d'hélicoptère hybride à haute vitesse X3 d'Eurocopter a franchi «le jalon historique» de 472 km/h en évoluant à une altitude d'environ 10'000 pieds (3048 m).



Mars Curiosity rover gets back to sending snapshots

After a week of down time due to a computer glitch, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is once again sending back pictures of its rocky Red Planet locale at Yellowknife Bay. In this fresh panorama, the rover looks as if it's sticking its drill-equipped robotic arm right in your face. "That drill is hungry, looking for something tasty to eat, and 'you' (loaded with water and organics) are it," jokes scientist-writer Ken Kremer, who collaborated with Italian colleague Marco Di Lorenzo to assemble the panorama. Curiosity's percussive drill played a key role in the science team's most recently reported breakthrough: the finding that powder drilled out of a Martian rock contained the chemical traces of a life-friendly environment that existed on Mars billions of years ago. The team's chemical analysis of the powder indicated that the minerals were probably formed in the presence of drinkable water. That kind of water no longer exists in liquid form on the Martian surface. The place where Curiosity is currently working may have once been in the vicinity of a riverbed, but it's now a cold and dry wasteland of sand and rock. In the weeks to come, Curiosity's scientists plan to drill into the rock again, looking for confirmatory clues about the potentially habitable environment in the Red Planet's past. The plan has been held up due to a series of minor setbacks — including a memory failure that may have been due to a cosmic-ray strike, a precautionary stand-down to weather a solar storm, and most recently a computer file glitch that put the rover into safe mode. The Curiosity team has been carefully bringing the rover back to full operation, and this picture is presumably part of the checkout process.
It won't be long before the rover will once more have to reduce its contact with its handlers back on Earth, due to an Earth-Mars-sun conjunction that will interfere with radio signaling. Curiosity's communication gap is expected to last from April 4 to May 1, as detailed in a mission update from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During the break, Curiosity is expected to carry on with its experiments, but the transmission of science data and images will have to wait until May. So let's enjoy these fresh images while we can.
For more of Curiosity's raw imagery, check out the galleries on JPL's Mars Science Laboratory website. You'll also find great pictures on UnmannedSpaceflight.com, where Kremer, Di Lorenzo and other image-processing gurus post their work. If you have 3-D glasses, whip 'em out and take a look at Ed Truthan's red-blue view of Curiosity's first drilling site.
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