Fridaygram: small world, little robots, tiny feature
By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog EditorSatellite images make the world seem smaller by letting us view images of
buildings and neighborhoods that are thousands of miles away. The satellite views in Google
Earth and Google Maps are updated periodically. Want to know when that happens? This week we
added support for 43 more languages to
Follow Your World, a web site that
emails you when satellite images are updated for anywhere you like. Just enter a location and
your email address, and you’ll be notified when a new aerial image is available.
Back on earth, engineers at UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic
Millisystems Lab have an awesome job: they get to build little robot bugs. Recently, the team
added
wings to its 10-centimeter Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod (DASH) robot to see
how the alteration would affect mobility. The plastic wings helped DASH move faster and climb
steeper hills, among other improvements.
Finally, here’s a tiny new
feature: if you do a
Google search for
ip, you’ll see your computer’s IP address. Handy!
And also: check out today’s
Google
Doodle, which honors the birthday of Mary Blair, a
Disney
Legend known for her work on
It’s a Small World and
many other theme park and movie projects. (If you’re reading this after October 21st, you can
see the Doodle on our
archive page
within a few days.)
Small explanation: Fridaygram
posts are lighter than our usual stuff, meant to provide a little geeky fun at the end of the
week.Updated at 4:30 PM to say that Follow Your
World added language support this week, rather than launching.
