It looks like there’s a massive toxic bug in Yorkshire! Run for the hills!

On closer inspection I’d say that a massive toxic bug has been squashed on Yorkshire. Come back from the hills and help clean this mess up.

A previous bug in Google Earth was swiftly fixed by the development team. Perhaps I should file a bug report?

Thanks: Ben

Near the top of Italy’s heel, there’s a mysterious-looking structure – an absolutely huge circle, 4 kilometres across! You might guess that this is a particle accelerator, but in fact it’s a perfectly circular high-speed test track – The Nardò Ring.

The ring is 12.5 km in circumference (around 7.8 miles) and is banked all the way round to allow the cars to achieve their absolute maximum top speed; which in practice means that a driver often need not turn the wheel at all once they get going. Essentially, cars can drive in a continuous straight line and yet somehow always end up exactly where they started…

The official site and the Wikipedia page are a little lacking, but see our other post about the Super Secret Volkswagen Test Track if you found this interesting.

Thanks to Ben, Luca D, munehiro, wanten, Luca, Rob James, woowoowoo, Craig, Dave, nixx, Alice Rizzoli, Mark, Francesco, Patrick and finally Tom!

Here in sunny Cornwall, England, is an absolutely fanastic-looking environmental complex – The Eden Project.

Built inside an old china clay quarry, the complex includes two sets of giant interconnected transparent domes made of ETFE cushions¹ (each emulating a natural biome), that house plant species from around the world. The larger of the two biodomes emulates a tropical environment, and is 55 metres high, 100 metres wide, 200 metres long, and covers 3.9 acres – which makes it the largest greenhouse in the world!

Not intended as a theme park, the Eden Project instead aims to highlight today’s major environmental issues, and they set a good environmental example too – the project’s energy all comes from local wind turbines, their litter is all recycled, and the massive quantity of water they use (to create the humid conditions of the Tropical Biome), is all collected rain water.

There’s actually a concert stage here (which doesn’t seem to have been built yet in these images), which was the location of the “Africa Calling” part of the worldwide Live 8 concerts of 2005, and the biodomes also feature in the 2002 James Bond movie, Die Another Day.

You can read more about The Eden Project at Wikipedia, visit the offical site, or to see more biodomes, see our older posts on Île Sainte-Hélène, a Geodesic Dome and Biosphere 2.

Thanks to Tom and Anthony Houghton.

Last week I started working in the nearby town of Swindon, where I asked my colleagues about the local sights. The unanimous answer to the best Swindon has to offer was “The Magic Roundabout“.

It may be saying something negative about the town if its most notable feature is a traffic junction, but the Magic Roundabout is truly a wonder of the world. And by “wonder” I don’t mean “wow” I mean “I wonder why they built such a stupidly complex junction”.

You see, the Magic Roundabout is in fact 5 small roundabouts surrounding one large centre roundabout. For the benefit of our non-British visitors I shall do my very best to explain…

In the U.K. we drive on the left hand side of the road, so on approach to a roundabout you give way to traffic coming from the right hand side. You then go clockwise around the roundabout, exiting where you see fit.

The Magic Roundabout complicates matters in that the moment you leave one roundabout you are at the junction of another. So, by aiming right on each roundabout you would actually traverse the central roundabout in an anti-clockwise manner. At least that’s the idea.

The roundabout was officially renamed from “County Islands” in the 90s because no-one used it official name, and roundabout fans Swindonweb even sell “I survived The Magic Roundabout” T-shirts.

Wikipedia

Thanks: Sfac, Russ, Jonathan Rawle, Arno Beckmann, Luke Sleeman, Stephen, The Red Max, Hans, John DeRoo, AndrewAnorak and my workmates.

Welcome visitors from Digg, it’s very nice to have you here! To be kept up to date with the latest in things to see on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Street View, you can subscribe to the Google Sightseeing RSS feed.

Here in central San Francisco, it seems there’s a violent drama unfolding as the Google Street View car passes by. A bit of friendly rough and tumble, or a more serious altercation? You be the judge…

Note: For this post, images that are directly beside each other were captured at exactly the same moment. All images are posted in chronological order.

As the Google car drives down Shrader Street, we can see that there’s a guy standing on the sidewalk, wearing a hat and a black jacket, holding his hands behind his back. There also appears to be some building work going on.

In the next frame we can see the black hat dude is currently talking to a guy in a tan jacket.

Then all of a sudden, the guy in the tan jacket seems to take a swing at the guy in the hat!

In the next frame, the guy in the tan jacket has grasped the hat guy round the chest, and is on top of him, seemingly pounding into him! The other guys on site are looking a little shocked.

By the next frame the scuffle is over, but the two men have moved quite a long way down the street in a single frame – perhaps they ran here? It certainly looks like the tan jacket guy is chasing the other guy.

The chase continues as the Google car turns the corner into Hayes Street. Notice that the hat guy is no longer wearing his hat – it was knocked off in the scuffle. He is looking a little worried however.

After that, the tan jacket guy turns back up the street to where he came from, but he’s stopped on the way by a woman who seems keen to discuss something with him. Meanwhile, hat guy skulks off down the street.

Tan jacket guy is still talking to the woman, but judging by his body language I’d say he isn’t overly keen to continue that conversation. At this very moment, the Google car passes right by the hat guy, affording us a pretty good close up of his profile.

Now you’ll have to decide for yourself, but it looks a lot like he has a bleeding nose, right? He’s definitely got a sore looking neck, and is that blood above his ear?

There’s one more close up shot of the hat guy before the Google car leaves him too far behind, in which we can again see that he’s definitely got something on his face…

So, can anybody offer any other explanation of what happened here? Or even better, does anyone recognise any of these people?