Fridaygram: Galapagos images, smart dog, timely entanglement
By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog
Editor
On
Fridaygram we
love to celebrate amazing new Street View images. This week we announced new panoramic views
of the
Galapagos
Islands, collected with with the
Street
View Trekker in partnership with the
Charles Darwin Foundation
(CDF) and the
Galapagos National Parks
Directorate (GNPD). These images will go live on Google Maps later this year, but
you can see a preview below and on the
Official
Google Blog.
The Maps team’s 10-day adventure included lots of interaction with local wildlife, but didn’t
take place entirely on land. The team worked with the
Catlin Seaview Survey to collect
underwater ocean images too. And in addition to being beautiful and fun, these pictures have a
practical use: they act as a visual record that can be compared to changes observed in the
future.
Speaking of wildlife, do you have a smart dog? And does your smart dog know 1000+ words, plus
have a basic comprehension of grammar? Meet
Chaser,
a 9-year-old border collie who has been taught to recognize the names of 1000
objects, as well as the meaning of some verbs and prepositions. In tests, Chaser correctly
(most of the time) responded to commands such as “take ball to Frisbee”, or even “to Frisbee
take ball”. If only our friends and family were that helpful.
Finally, there’s some typically mind-blowing news from the world of quantum physics. We
already know that quantum particles can share a connection called
entanglement, which
allows one particle to reflect the state of another no matter how far apart they are. Now an
experimental discovery shows that
particles
can be entangled even if they don’t exist at the same time. We agree with
experimenter Jeremy O'Brien of the University of Bristol, who said “It’s really cool”.
Fridaygram is
about randomly cool and nerdy stories that we hope will amuse you and possibly inspire your
weekend. Around here we’re still feeling the Google I/O afterglow, so we’re
going to recommend you spend some time this weekend watching some of the many session videos from
I/O. If that’s not your thing, maybe you’d like this brief but inspiring video that
kicked off the conference.
