Author: Shaunacy Ferro

If you order up an UberX in the Bay Area, your car may show up sans driver. The ride-hailing app just debuted autonomous vehicles to supplement its fleet of human drivers in San Francisco, according to The Verge.

The company began testing autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh in September, and tech-obsessed Silicon Valley seems like an obvious choice for a bigger trial. Uber says that San Francisco’s varied terrain, traffic, greater density of cyclists, and weather will provide a new layer of challenges that can help the company improve its vehicle technology. The San Francisco pilot will feature Volvo XC90s, compared to the Ford Fusions deployed in Pittsburgh.

You won’t necessarily get an autonomous car every time you order. Sometimes, a human driver may be closer. Even if you do, there will still be a human minder to take the wheel if something goes wrong. Still, if you prefer not to get in a car driven by a robot, you can also opt out in the app and end up with a person instead.

However, there are some roadblocks. According to The Verge, the pilot may run afoul of California’s strict driving laws, which require companies to obtain permits to let autonomous cars run wild on city streets. Uber doesn’t yet have those permits. But the company thinks those rules don’t apply to its cars. Of the state requirement, the company’s statement says, “We have looked at this issue carefully and we don’t believe we do [need testing permits].” Uber goes on to explain:

“First, we are not planning to operate any differently than in Pittsburgh, where our pilot has been running successfully for several months. Second, the rules apply to cars that can drive without someone controlling or monitoring them. For us, it’s still early days and our cars are not yet ready to drive without a person monitoring them.”

Whether the California DMV will be persuaded is a different matter.

[h/t The Verge]

It’s been 10 years since the first episodes of Planet Earth aired on the BBC, and in celebration, the network asked some nature-focused YouTube creators to nominate their favorite moments from the mini-series. Those scenes have now been strung together in a beautiful compilation video, which was spotted by Kottke.org.

Planet Earth aired as the most expensive nature documentary ever commissioned by the BBC and its first in high definition, so it’s no surprise that the series was full of amazing imagery. From footage of lions and elephants shot entirely at night, to the hilarious-looking mating dance of the bird-of-paradise, there are plenty of memorable moments to look back on before you watch the new Planet Earth II, which comes to BBC America in January.

You will have to sit through some narration from various YouTubers, but it’s helpful to hear them describe what exactly is going on in the context of the episode, and the images themselves are more than worth it.

[h/t Kottke.org]

If you need to hire a professional Santa this holiday season, look no further than that ubiquitous networking site, LinkedIn.

Quartz tracked down some Santas who advertise their expertise on LinkedIn. One serves as the Chairman of Discover Santa 2016, and is employed by the Kringle Group, LLC. While none seem to be educated at the North Pole, there are a few who attended the Charles W. Howard Santa School, known as one of the most prestigious Santa-themed educational institutions in the U.S. Some advertise themselves as a team, with Santa, “Mrs. Clause,” and an elf as a single package.

The holidays are not the only time you can request these Santas’ services, either. One Kentucky Santa, who describes himself as “an experienced real bearded Santa Claus for hire,” says he’s “available year round for home parties, Grandkids visits, company/corporate parties, family reunions, photo opportunities, product promotions, commercials and Holiday kick-offs.” He also refers to himself as “this old reindeer driver.”

This may be the only time LinkedIn could be described as full of mirth.

[h/t Quartz]

All images via LinkedIn unless otherwise noted.

Prague’s newest spot to curl up with a good book is a nearly 138-foot-long zeppelin suspended above an art museum. As Lonely Planet reports, the city’s DOX Center for Contemporary Art built the wood-and-steel structure to serve as a reading room and space for literary talks. It was unveiled in a ceremony at the art center on December 10, and opened to the public the next day.

With a Jonathan-Swift-inspired name (“Gulliver”), the design by architect Martin Rajniš is meant to reference utopian literature and the optimism of early 20th century technology. Cantilevered between buildings, the airship is accessible by stairs that stretch from the roof of one of the gallery buildings. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to dangle midair between the buildings at any point.)

Time to add Prague to your world tour of literary locales.

[h/t Lonely Planet]

All images courtesy DOX via Facebook

It’s that time of year again, when gingerbread artisans put the rest of us to holiday-themed shame. Redditor ejustice, who has in previous years created nerdtastic cookie “houses” of spaceships like the Millennium Falcon, decided to attempt new heights (and puns) for his 2016 take on the annual spiced dessert creation.

The Starship Gingerprise, spotted by io9, is a dessert architecture take on the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. But it isn’t just a recreation of a beloved sci-fi ship—it’s the nod to the spacecraft’s penchant for regularly crashing into planets. The mostly edible gingerbread version of the Starfleet ship is depicted as crash-landing through cotton clouds that are made of an inedible crafting product called Buffalo Snow.

Here’s the full image:

It’s a worthy addition to National Gingerbread House Day (December 12), even if it’s not technically a house.

[h/t io9]

The U.S. has a treasure trove of historic sites to visit, but geography makes it nearly impossible to visit them all in one trip—or does it? Led by University of Waterloo professor William Cook, a team of researchers used Google Maps and the famous “traveling salesman” mathematics problem to figure out the shortest route to see every single site on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, as Travel + Leisure reports.

The trip covers more than 217,605 miles and includes more than 49,600 sites, ending back at the original starting point. To put that into context: the distance from Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles.

Even with hundreds of University of Waterloo computers working on the problem, solving it took four international researchers two years. It began with computing a test problem that calculated the shortest distance between more than 24,700 pubs in the UK. Once that was solved, it took the computers a combined total of 178.9 hours (adding all the computers’ hourly contributions together). Ideally, you would start in Birmingham, Alabama at the A.G. Gaston Building, a landmark of modern architectural design developed by its namesake African-American entrepreneur, and travel the country before ending up back in Alabama at the 16th Street Baptist Church, famous for serving as the headquarters of civil rights meetings in the 1960s.

If you don’t have enough time to visit every single historic building, home, landmark, and monument on the list, the researchers did put together region-specific versions of the tour, too.

[h/t Travel + Leisure]

All images courtesy William Cook.

The intrepid home brewer can now create a truly unique beer. The ODIN, a company that sells DIY science kits, has created an at-home brewing kit that lets you create glowing beer, as Eater reports.

The bioluminescent beer gets its glow from a jellyfish gene in the genetically modified yeast. Jellyfish-derived fluorescence has also been used to create glowing animals, including sheep, rabbits, and pigs.

The ODIN was founded by a former NASA biologist, Josiah Zayner, who has previously launched kits for amateur scientists to perform experiments with technology—like the gene-editing tool CRISPR—at home. While the FDA has come calling over worries that the beer kit would be unsafe for consumption, the company has performed safety tests to allay those fears, so brew up a batch of luminescent suds at your own discretion.

The beer-brewing kit is $199.

[h/t Eater]

The intrepid home brewer can now create a truly unique beer. The ODIN, a company that sells DIY science kits, has created an at-home brewing kit that lets you create glowing beer, as Eater reports.

The bioluminescent beer gets its glow from a jellyfish gene in the genetically modified yeast. Jellyfish-derived fluorescence has also been used to create glowing animals, including sheep, rabbits, and pigs.

The ODIN was founded by a former NASA biologist, Josiah Zayner, who has previously launched kits for amateur scientists to perform experiments with technology—like the gene-editing tool CRISPR—at home. While the FDA has come calling over worries that the beer kit would be unsafe for consumption, the company has performed safety tests to allay those fears, so brew up a batch of luminescent suds at your own discretion.

The beer-brewing kit is $199.

[h/t Eater]

One of the most stunning weather phenomena in the world happens in northern Venezuela, where the Catatumbo River pours into Lake Maracaibo. The area sees almost never-ending lightning storms.

In a new video, The Weather Channel’s “That’s Amazing” profiles a 21-year-old photographer who’s on a constant search to capture the Never-Ending Storm on film. German storm chaser Jonas Piontek travels all over the world to capture the beauty of extreme weather, but he’s particularly interested in Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, which has the most lightning strikes of anywhere in the world—1.2 million a year. He braves not just the intense, frequent lightning storms, but also hurricane-force winds to do so. See some of his work in the video below. You’ll want to watch in HD.

In the 16th century, the wealthy had more than just the average rosary at their disposal during their moments of worship. Coveted boxwood carvings depicting intricate religious scenes in miniature allowed the rich to fit religious art right in their hands. Until early 2017, the Art Gallery of Ontario is hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to these tiny hand-carved works of art, as CNN reports.

“Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures” features more than 60 boxwood miniatures, some of which have never been on display in North America before, like a rosary owned by King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The wooden carvings have been part of a years-long, international study using scientific imaging to better understand how they were produced. The study uncovered some surprises, like a hidden portrait of a king and queen that went undiscovered for 500 years.

The collection includes prayer beads (one in the shape of a skull), a knife inscribed with biblical scenes, medallions, triptychs, rosaries, and even sarcophagi. Some date all the way back to the late 1400s.

The exhibition runs until January 22, but you can also see high-resolution images of the entire collection on the gallery’s website. For more information, watch a video with the curator below.

[h/t CNN]