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  fly like a frog, on a hoverboard

2:22 mins

"When footage of a flying hoverboard first emerged last month, many thought it was fake, because the relatively tiny device appears to be breaking the laws of physics. But the "Flyboard Air" from inventor Franky Zapata is real, spectacular and just set a world record for the longest hoverboard flight of all time. It traveled 2,252 meters or 7,388 feet, nearly ten times farther than the mark set last year by Catalin Alexandru Duru on a much larger device. The record has already been certified by Guinness, which attended the event.

"Frenchman Zapata is the man behind the Flyboard, a watersports device that amounts to a firehose attached to boots. However, the Flyboard Air is completely untethered, and has mind-boggling specs -- it can supposedly fly up to 10,000 feet high and hit 93 miles per hour. Zapata makes it look pretty easy to maneuver, as shown in a test run video (below) made earlier, though he is a jet ski champ with a lot of experience on the original Flyboard. In fact, he says that it would be insane to try the Flyboard Air without at least 100 hours of experience on the Flyboard."

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new generation hoverboards

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Why so many government, and other, statistics are unreliable.
Recommended reading.

"It matters a lot which measurement is used: the original Brazilian measurement system results in 602,000 suspected cases; the IntergGrowth method could result in as few as 3,000 suspected cases."

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understanding graphs and charts

birds giving away a baby or two as protection money

Egret and crocodile. Image credit: mirror.co.uk /p>

"Wading birds contribute to the alligators' diet when they give up a few chicks to protect many. But when raccoons and possums invade colonies, the birds abandon them because the mammals will eat every single egg and chick. Alligators become a necessary evil. "It's like keeping a murderer in your yard to keep out a cat burglar," Nell said. Except the burglar is also a murderer."

the web address for the article above is https://www.abelard.org/news/science032016.php#birds-bribe-crocs-070316

nimble replacement human in the snow

2:41 mins

"A robot's nimble steps in a snowy forest have wowed the world's robotics industry. Boston Dynamics, the secretive, Google-owned company, released video of its latest human-like robot tromping through a field slipping occasionally on uneven terrain but always catching its balance."

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BigDog - pack-carrying robot

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