Holy Crap: [link]

Authorities were scouring the skies Thursday for a 6-year-old boy who reportedly unhooked his family's experimental balloon-powered aircraft and floated away from home, sheriff's officials said.

I so would have gone off in a balloon mobile.

Lock it up, dipshits!

ION, Linda Thorson is still looking good and back to modeling.

The balloon looks like it's starting to deflate. Here's to the good hope of a safe landing.

Lock it up, dipshits!

Yeah, total ParentingFail.

You know what they need? They need a blimp to go catch it.

It's half-inflated now, visibly. I don't think they have to worry about it hitting Denver, I'm hoping it lands soft in a farm field.

I hope the kid's been able to breathe.

Dunno if this goes in Natter, Tech or Gaming... but scientist have made mice run around in Quake 2.

Princeton neuroscientist David Tank wanted to study individual neurons in a mouse’s hippocamus as it moves. But the movement of the mouse’s body prevented accurate readings. So he placed the mouse on a giant trackball and let it run through a virtual maze from the video game Quake 2 displayed on screens. Brandon Keim writes in Wired:

Studying individual neurons has been possible in cell cultures, but brains in a dish behave different than real, living brains. Tracking individual neurons in moving animals has been impossible.

“The neurons move back and forth while you’re trying to measure things,” said Tank. “So we developed a way to keep the head fixed in space, but still have mice perform behaviors that are usually studied in mice running through a maze.”

Tank’s team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball’s movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers’ virtual reality software — a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it “a mini-IMAX theater.”

10K isn't too bad -- I'd be more worried about the cold.

According to CNN, it's down to 900 feet, so here's hoping it will continue to gently descend.

Balloon landings can be downright rough even when they're controlled.

I hope the kid's been able to breathe.

If it's true that he's about 2500 ft above Denver (at 5280), he should be okay. 02 tanks for hang gliding generally turn on at 10,000 ft.

It looks like the kid might not be in the balloon.