BIG BIRD: Boeing's 747-8 Intercontinental took to the air for the first time the other day. The enormous passenger plane can seat 467 passengers in a three-class configuration. It flies up to 14,815 Km at a cruise speed of Mach 0.85, and the wingspan is 68.5 metres. It's quieter, lighter and more fuel efficient than its competitors. More for less, that's good. More at Wired and video on YouTube.
RED HOUSE DISTRICT: Staff from the Field Intelligence Lab at MIT in the USA drove around with sensors mounted on a car to make a thermal map of the entire city of Cambridge, USA. They wanted to see which buildings were wasting energy by allowing heat to escape. The team used a process called Kinetic Super Resolution to combine multiple images from cheaper low-res cameras into a higher resolution picture. Images show heat loss as red and yellow areas. Now they're creating software to translate the thermal images into data about energy efficiency. Arrest that heat! More at MIT.
TWEETIE PIE: If you want to develop a 4 gram ornithopter, as roboticists at Cornell University did, the hardest part is the wings. Manufacturing the tiny wings could take days to complete as it was a finicky process. Now, thanks to 3D printing, they can do it in minutes. The printer stretches a thin polyester film over a carbon fibre frame and produces the other complex components easily. The resulting flapping-wing hovering insect managed 85 seconds of flight. But why? More at CCSL and video on YouTube.
SNIPER ON YOUR SIX: Some US soldiers are to be equipped with Individual Gunshot Detectors. Four small acoustic sensors, each the size of a deck of cards, attach to the soldier's body armour. They detect the supersonic sound waves generated by gunfire. A small display screen shows which direction the shot came from. The Army is also looking into networking the devices so nearby soldiers have the same data. There's another gadget that needs power - they'd better hurry with the solar uniforms. More at IBTimes.
A SPOT OF GLUE SAVES YOU: A Harvard University team found that adding a thin layer of glue to plastic discs being pulled through a hole prevented them from crumpling. This led to a suggestion that a layer of glue added to sheets of metal that might pass one another in an impact could also make cars more resistant in collisions. Or to being sucked into passing vortices. More at NewScientist.
- Miraz Jordan knowit.co.nz
Tech Universe: Monday 28 March
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