World's Oldest Car

It runs on steam, and it can be yours at auction next month for something north of $2 million.
1884 De Dion Bouton et Trepardoux Dos-a-Dos runabout. Courtesy RM Auctions
The car seats four people back-to-back (dos-a-dos in French). It has no steering wheel – just a tiller that looks like the handle of a shovel. There’s a water tank under the seats that propels the steam-powered engine, and it gets about half a mile per gallon.
It ran in the first automobile race in 1887, clocking a top speed of 37 mph, according to the auction house. It didn’t win.
“For 1884, for any car to be this complete is amazing,” said Alain Squindo, the editor in chief of catalogs at RM Auctions, which will sell the car on the afternoon of Oct. 7 in Hershey, Penn.
Squindo said that in the years since it was built, the car has had only four owners — one of them a family that kept it for 81 years — who made a point of keeping it in working order. Of late the car has belonged to a wealthy collector in Texas, who kept it under climate-controlled conditions.
“There are other cars — and I use the term loosely — that may be older, but this is the oldest that still works,” said Squindo.
It ’s easy to call this a one-of-a-kind car; it came well before Henry Ford’s adoption of the assembly line, which made automobiles popular and affordable.
You can win it if you have some spare cash, but you need a little just to look at the car. The auction catalog, which serves as an admission ticket for two, costs $100.

Twins Turn 50

The world's oldest living conjoined twins have defied doctors' predictions and are set to celebrate their 50th birthday this Sunday.
George and Lori Schappell, who are joined at the head, are marking the landmark birthday with a trip to London.
Remarkably, the Siamese twins are able to live very different and separate lives, with Lori having had relationships and George - who was originally named Dori - deciding to live life as a man.
Lori is also a champion ten-pin bowler and George performs as a country and western singer.
"When we were born, the doctors didn't think we'd make 30, but we proved them wrong," the Daily Mail quoted Lori as saying.
"We have learned so much in the last 50 years and will continue living life to the full," she added.
While Lori, who is 5ft 1in, was born able-bodied, 4ft 4in George suffers from spina bifida, which has caused severe mobility problems.
The twins, from Pennsylvania in America, were born sharing 30 per cent of their frontal lobe brain tissue and critical blood vessels, meaning they cannot be separated.

DEFUNCT NASA ROCKET

NASA will work with developers of a proposed new commercial rocket, made in part from its now defunct Ares 1 crew launcher, which could eventually move crews and supplies to the International Space Station, officials said on Tuesday.
The rocket also would include the core stage of Europe's Ariane 5 booster.
The agreement with Alliant Techsystems Inc and its European partner Astrium, an EADS company, is for technical support services from NASA, not money. Alliant intends to eventually offer its Liberty rocket for sale to fly crews to the space station.
The rocket also will be sold for satellite launches and station cargo resupply missions, said Kent Rominger, a former astronaut who now manages the Liberty Launch System program for Alliant.
"We are absolutely looking at all the markets for Liberty," he said.
The rocket consists of a space shuttle-derived solid fuel booster, originally called Ares 1, developed under NASA's now-canceled Constellation moon exploration program.
Alliant competed for NASA funding to develop the commercial version of its Ares 1, renamed Liberty and featuring an upper-stage motor provided by Astrium. Both rockets have long and successful histories of space flight, which Rominger says gives Liberty a leg up in price and safety over competing systems.
The U.S. space agency, however, instead chose to award contracts worth a total of $269 million to Boeing Co, Space Exploration Technologies, Sierra Nevada Corp, and Blue Origin to work on spaceship technologies, not launch vehicles.
NASA's evaluation of the Liberty rocket is expected to last about nine months.
The rocket is designed to carry about 44,000 pounds (19,958 kg) to an orbit a few hundred miles (km) above Earth, such as where the space station flies. NASA hopes to turn over crew ferry flights to a commercial provider by about 2015.
The Obama administration is seeking to help industry develop space taxis that can ferry astronauts to and from the space station, a service now solely provided by Russia at a cost of more than $50 million per person.

Cambodian baby

An 18-month-old Cambodian boy who has suckled milk directly from a cow daily for more than a month is in fine health, the child's grandfather said on Sunday.
The boy, Tha Sophat, made international headlines after his grandfather revealed he had been feeding himself directly from a cow since July when a storm destroyed his home storm and his parents left for Thailand to find work.
After he stopped breast-feeding from his mother, the boy became ill, said the 46-year-old grandfather.
The boy watched a calf nurse from its mother, and began to do the same thing, feeding direcly from the cow each day, Um Oeung added. When the grandfather pulled him away, the boy cried, so he let him continue, Um Oeung told Reuters.
Neighbours and local officials in the village of Pheas in Siem Reap province, about 315 km (195 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh, say they are not happy about the nursing.
"They blame me and have told me not to allow him to suckle from the cow anymore. They say the boy will be ashamed when he grows up and that he will be naughty," he said.

Youngest Female Sarpanch

It's a story that's actually many stories.
A village named Soda didn't have water. So the young sarpanch, Chhavi Rajawat (incidentally a young, female MBA graduate) got inquisitive about the funds allocated to the village. Since more had been spent than allocated, she raised funds on her own.
Money came from family and friends - 20 lakh rupees wasn't enough for the Rs 3.5 crore that the reservoir needed.
So Chhavi Rajawat got more even inquisitive about the funds sanctioned to her village. Files at the district headquarters in Tonk revealed a calculation error. Chavi decided to get proactive about the lack of transparency and accountability. Soda thus became India's first IT-enabled village, after tying up with a German software vendor to set up an internet and intranet portal. along with a technology education lab.
The portal allows Soda's 10,000 strong population 24x7 access to the funds sanctioned for the village.
There's also online postings of birth and death certificates, besides posting land records online.
"A fire in Tonk had destroyed land records of many villages," says Rajawat. "This ERP (enterprise resource planning) application will have an electronic database, and store all land records in servers."
Rajawat recently represented India at a recent UN poverty summit.
Youngest Female Sarpanch Makes Her Village IT-Enabled
"Most youth in the village are unemployed, as they don't have higher education due to absence of a college. We want to change that with e-education," says she.
There's even a website, www.soda-india.in where Chavi posts info about funds allocated for projects such as a village bank, community centre for weddings and cataract surgery for the needy.
Theres even plans to link Soda's portal with the state government's websites.This will make Soda the first fully computerized Panchayat in India. While there has been a sanction by the Central government (Rs 4,500 crore) for the e-panchayat project, matters of fund allocation and project monitoring are not clearly mentioned.

Data Storage Firm BlueArc

Hitachi Ltd <6501.T> said on Thursday it has bought struggling California-based network storage company BlueArc Corp in an all-cash transaction after a five-year OEM partnership, in the latest such move to take advantage of the yen's strength.
Hitachi did not reveal the cost of the acquisition, but Japan's Asahi newspaper said it was about $500-600 million.
The yen hit a record high 75.94 yen to the dollar last month, compared with about 85 yen a year ago, making overseas acquisitions cheaper for Japanese firms. On Thursday it traded around 77.40 yen.
Last month Asahi Group Holdings <2502.T> said it was acquiring New Zealand beverage group Independent Liquor for $1.3 billion.
"Bringing BlueArc into the Hitachi family will enable us to better serve customers with more tightly integrated technologies, broader capabilities and deeper expertise globally," Hitachi Data Systems chief executive Jack Domme said in a news release posted on the company's website.
Hitachi's move comes after BlueArc filed with U.S. regulators in June for an initial public offering to raise up to $100 million, saying in its regulatory filing it had been posting losses since 2003 and expected to continue to do so.
Wells Fargo Securities was the exclusive financial adviser to Hitachi Data Systems in the buyout, while BofA Merrill Lynch acted as financial adviser and Credit Suisse as a co-adviser to BlueArc, Hitachi said on its website.
Shares in Hitachi were up 0.5 percent at 395 yen in early afternoon trade, while the benchmark Nikkei Average <.N225> was up 0.3 percent.