Students use VR to recreate Hiroshima bombing

Fukuyama: It’s a sunny morning in the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Cicadas chirp in the trees. A lone plane flies high overhead. Then a flash of light, followed by a loud blast. Buildings are flattened and smoke rises from crackling fires under a darkened sky. Over two years, some Japanese high school students has been painstakingly producing a five-minute virtual reality experience that recreates the sights and sounds of Hiroshima before, during and after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city 73 years ago on August 6. By transporting users back in time when a city was turned into a wasteland, the students hope to ensure that something similar never happens again. ap

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NASA Curiosity rover completes 6 years on Mars

Washington: NASA’s Curiosity rover is celebrating its sixth anniversary on Mars which is currently experiencing a global storm. “I touched down on #Mars six years ago. Celebrating my 6th landing anniversary with the traditional gift of iron… oxide. (It puts the red in Red Planet.),” said a tweet sent out by the rover on Sunday. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. ianS

New slippery packaging can cut food waste 

Washington: Researchers from Virginia Tech in the US, including one of Indian origin, have developed super slippery packaging that lets consumers squeeze out every last drop of a product, and could significantly cut down food wastage. Food left behind in plastic packaging contributes to the millions of pounds of perfectly edible products being wasted every year. The study, published in Scientific Reports, establishes a method for wicking chemically compatible vegetable oils into the surfaces of common extruded plastics. Not only will the technique help sticky foods release from their packaging much more easily, it can also be applied to plastics. Reuters

$22,000 fine for climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge 

Sydney: Climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge illegally will now cost offenders Aus$22,000 after authorities on Monday raised the fine more than six-fold as part of new security measures. The New South Wales state government will also install anti-climb mesh, higher fencing and more cameras to deter people from scaling the world-renowned landmark. afp