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She's not the first woman to head a global corporation.

Ginni Rometty runs IBM, and Indra Nooyi heads PepsiCo. Don't forget Ursula Burns at Xerox and Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard. There's Marissa Mayer at Yahoo.

Still, when Mary Barra emerged on Tuesday as the new chief executive of General Motors, the announcement felt historic. Next month, the 51-year-old daughter of a GM factory worker will succeed retiring Dan Akerson as leader of the biggest U.S. automaker.

The automotive sphere has been seen as a guy thing since the first oil-splattered cars started rolling down dirt roads in the late 1800s. Even now in Saudi Arabia, women risk violence or arrest just for sitting behind the wheel of a car.

But in Detroit, Barra leapt ahead of men such as Mark Reuss, president of GM North America; Dan Ammann, chief financial officer; and Steve Girsky, vice chairman.

"It is remarkable because the auto industry has always been such a male-dominated industry," says Jerry Jasinowski, an economist and past president of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Just 1 in 5 workers in the auto industry is a woman, and a mere 4 percent of CEOs at all major U.S. companies are female. So Barra's promotion is a big deal. On the other hand, auto analysts say her elevation should not come as a surprise to anyone at GM because her career path has been so steady.

Lately, robots have been taking over all kinds of jobs that humans used to do on the farm — from thinning lettuce to harvesting spinach.

Three brothers in Minnesota are betting that robots could compete with machines on the farm, too: the huge, and often inefficient, fertilizer applicators made by John Deere and the like. The brothers' Rowbot, in comparison, is so small it can move between rows of crops and fertilize plants one at a time.

"We joked about it being the Roomba of the cornfield," says one of the brothers, Kent Cavender-Bares, referring to the autonomous vacuum cleaner.

The motivation for creating a fertilizer robot is simple: Many farmers overuse fertilizer, and that's costly and bad for the environment. But farmers don't have many tools to help them cut back.

The Salt

Putting Farmland On A Fertilizer Diet

There's outrage among many in the deaf community over the appearance on stage Monday of a man who they say was only pretending to do sign language interpretation as President Obama and other world leaders eulogized Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Among those who noticed what was happening was Wilma Newhoudt, the first deaf person elected to South Africa's parliament and a vice president of the World Federation of the Deaf.

"Shame on this male so called interpreter on the stage," she wrote on Twitter during the memorial service. "What is he signing? He knows that the deaf cannot vocally boo him off. Shame on him!"

Others who protested included Bruno Peter Druchen, national director at the Deaf Federation of South Africa. "Please get RID of this CLOWN interpreter, please!" he tweeted.

The Limping Chicken, a U.K. website that focuses on news involving the deaf community, posted a video showing both the "fake" and a sign language interpreter who many TV viewers saw in a small box superimposed on their screens. The woman in that box was actually interpreting what was said, Limping Chicken reports. You can see how different her actions and gestures are compared to those of the man on stage.

Uruguay will become the world's first country to approve the growing, selling and use of marijuana, after the country's Senate voted for the change, which the president has promised to sign into law.

Reuters describes the move as "a pioneering social experiment that will be closely watched by other nations debating drug liberalization."

Sen. Constanza Moreira, who voted with the majority, called the vote on Tuesday "an historic day."

"Many countries of Latin America, and many governments, will take this law as an example," she said.

The Senate vote was 16 to 13, with the ruling Broad Front majority united in favor, The Associated Press says.

Reuters says that under the new law, set to go into effect in April, "Cannabis consumers will be able to buy a maximum of 1.4 ounces each month from licensed pharmacies as long as they are Uruguayan residents over the age of 18 and registered on a government database that will monitor their monthly purchases."

"When the law is implemented in 120 days, Uruguayans will be able to grow six marijuana plants in their homes a year, or as much about 17 ounces, and form smoking clubs of 15 to 45 members that can grow up to 99 plants per year."