BILLUND, Denmark—Lego A/S has spent the past seven years trying to make its blocks with plastic derived from plants, but it keeps hitting brick walls. Lego has so far tested more than 200 combinations of materials, but just 2% of its products are made from plant-based plastic. Plant Plastics
Ethanol derived from sugar cane is turned into plastic used to make a small slice of Lego pieces.

In that year, missionary Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam wagon to bring the Emperor of China to Jesus, but the car was only big enough to carry a rat. Reporting on the bicycle and automobile show at Madison Square Garden in January 1899, a New York Times journalist noted that the normally avant-garde US was “far behind the European countries in adopting the bicycle and motor vehicles. Motor World reported in 1903 that John Jacob Astor owned fifteen automobiles, including a $17,000 Mors from France (equivalent to half a million dollars today).

Just days after a poacher’s snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home, according to conservationists on the scene. “This is absolutely the first time that we’ve seen juveniles doing that … I don’t know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares,” said Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s Karisoke Research Center, located in the reserve where the event took place. Every day trackers from the Karisoke center comb the forest for snares, dismantling them to protect the endangered mountain gorillas, which the International Fund for Nature (IUCN) says face “a very high risk of extinction in the wild.”

Earlier this year on 13 April, Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, a world famous visual device for organizing thought and developing ideas, died at 76. A student of Psychology, English and Creative Thinking, Buzan first rose to prominence in the 1970s with the publication of a book about speed reading and a ten-part television series produced by the BBC, Use Your Head (1974), which promoted mental literacy in the same fashion that John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) promoted visual literacy. At any point, a symbol on one map may be appropriated and used as a central image for a new map, forming a graphic ‘re-presentation’ (Buzan’s emphasis) of an inner mental network.

With more open-air concerts in the coming weeks at the RDS, Croke Park, Nowlan Park and Trinity College Dublin from Bon Jovi, Fleetwood Mac, Westlife, Bob Dylan, New Order and others it remains to be seen how many heritage rock/pop acts one small country can sustain – or endure – in a single summer. On the face of it, many of these spoken-word events just look like extensions of the traditional book trade
On Thursday, you could have seen historian Simon Schama in conversation at the National Concert Hall, while on Monday, the Olympia Theatre in Dublin will host a discussion between journalists Bob Woodward and Fintan O’Toole about (what else?) On the face of it, many of these spoken-word events just look like extensions of the traditional book trade, which these days works its authors to the bone at festivals, seminars, public interviews and signings.

Experts who reviewed the Jones profile’s LinkedIn activity say it’s typical of espionage efforts on the professional networking site, whose role as a global Rolodex has made it a powerful magnet for spies. “It smells a lot like some sort of state-run operation,” said Jonas Parello-Plesner, who serves as program director at the Denmark-based think tank Alliance of Democracies Foundation and was the target several years ago of an espionage operation that began over LinkedIn . “I’m probably the worst LinkedIn user in the history of LinkedIn,” said Winfree, the former deputy director of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy council, who confirmed connection with Jones on March 28.

The Florida unmanned trucking company Starsky Robotics may have set a record for the fastest an uncrewed vehicle has driven on a (closed) public road, when one of its trucks hit 55 MPH with nobody on board in a recent speed test on the Selmon Expressway outside Tampa E [Ed: if you have evidence suggesting otherwise, please send it to ed at thedrive dot com]. This milestone comes as Starsky approaches its first uncrewed public road test, and builds toward operating a “driverless” freight company in Florida and several other Southeastern states. Starsky began its first fully uncrewed testing in February, and has been building up to the recent 55 MPH test, which is the planned operating speed for the firm’s trucks.

In this blog post, we describe a few applications of making internet-hosted data available inside an immutable public blockchain: placing BigQuery data available on-chain using a Chainlink oracle smart contract. To close the loop and allow bidirectional interoperation, we need to be not only making blockchain data programmatically available to cloud services, but also cloud services programmatically available on-chain to smart contracts. How we built it

At a high level, Ethereum Dapps (i.e. smart contract applications) request data from Chainlink, which in turn retrieves data from a web service built with Google App Engine and BigQuery.

Shares of Israeli gig-economy company Fiverr International rose Thursday morning on the first day of trading for the freelance marketplace. Fiverr stock (ticker: FVRR), which on Wednesday priced its IPO at $21 a share, was up 45% to $30.41 late Thursday morning after opening at $26. The IPO price means Fiverr will raise in the neighborhood of $100 million.

As a free/open-source software (FOSS) or open-source hardware project grows, it is likely to reach a point where it requires a legal entity for better operation — whether to gather donations, pay for development, handle finances, organize events, increase license predictability and flexibility by consolidating rights, help with better governance, or for other reasons. The basic premise for all asset types is that no other single organization should own anything from the member project; Public Software is not interested in being a “front” for corporate open source. Public Software CIC is perfectly happy and fit to hold trademarks, domain names, and such for its member projects (in fact, if a project holds a trademark, Public Software would require a transfer).