It’s a shame that PWCs don’t have doors. It would be so much fun seeing them blown off by Sea-Doo’s RXP–the undisputed new king of personal muscle craft. The closest thing to being shot out of a particle accelerator, on the water, the RXP experience redefines performance with a clean, green 215-hp Rotax engine. How does 0 to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds grab ya, or 0 to 30 mph in 1....
Media Platforms Design TeamPITTSBURGH — The news that Segway had been added to the list of exhibitors at the two-day RoboBusiness conference here wasn’t exactly explosive. Robots do a fine job of embarrassing themselves without having to be strapped to one of those highly-advanced, self-balancing laughing stocks. But one of the only true unveilings we’ve seen at this event has been from Segway, and it’s precisely as interesting as the Segway isn’t....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn 2009 Sikorsky Aircraft built the world’s fastest helicopter, the X2, which clocked in at nearly 287 miles per hour and earned a PM Breakthrough Award to boot. Since then, the company has been incorporating the technology into designs for a new helo—the Raider S-97—which it plans to offer it to the U.S. Army in 2015. Like the X2 Demonstrator, the S-97 will use a coaxial rotor system....
“This house is from the future,” observed a fourth-grader as she and fellow classmates toured the Lumenhaus, a net-zero home built by students at Virginia Tech University for the 2009 Solar Decathlon. The home had its first public reception among engineers and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., where it took the bronze in architecture and came in 13th overall in the 20-school contest this October. But some time around midnight on Jan....
Media Platforms Design Team Some ideas are just too obsession-inducing for their inventors to abandon. German designer Hanno Fischer began chasing the ultimate airplane-boat hybrid design more than 40 years ago—and he’s still at it. PM first caught up with him in July 1989, reporting on the engineer’s new “flarecraft” Airfish II, which relied on ground effect—lift caused by a wing’s compression of air against water—for shallow flight. The Airfish II was supposed to debut in 1990, with a 20-ft....
Standard Nerf darts not back enough punch for you? Don’t want to spend the money to upgrade all the way to messy paintball guns? Here’s a happy medium: Mod your Nerf darts into tiny, flying tasers! What could go wrong! Caleb Kraft is clearly determined to find out. His taser Nerf-gun works by taking the capacitor from the flash of a disposable camera and packing it into the body of one of Nerf’s giant-sized missile-like darts....
Media Platforms Design TeamCoanda Effect In the early 1900s Romanian researcher Henri Coanda proved airflow sticks to a gently curved surface. This simple principle is a central tenet of hydrology and aerodynamics. Saucer Application Avro engineers found that routing exhaust over the lower hemisphere of a saucer forms a cushion beneath the craft, enabling it to hover. However, they overestimated the cushion’s height and power.Other Uses Some airplanes, such as the C-17 Globemaster III, use the Coanda effect to route exhaust across the tops of their wings to speed airflow, increasing lift when planes are flying at low speeds....
Media Platforms Design TeamFully Charged: The Tesla Roadster is as fun to drive as it is to look at. We’ve taken a look at the Tesla Roadster from afar and we’ve taken a ride in the spunky electric sports car too. But recently we had a chance to pry the keys away from a Tesla engineer and climb behind the wheel of a hand-built $350,000 Development Prototype Tesla Roadster.Slide into the thinly padded driver’s seat of the Tesla and it looks and feels very familiar....
A few weeks ago, hardware hacker Samy Kamkar showed us a trick he had for cracking open Master Locks in eight tries or less. It was just a little complex, and like most things, a computer makes it easy. With some 3D printing, a motor and an Arduino you get the Combo Breaker, a DIY machine that can crack locks in 30 seconds or less. The Combo Breaker uses a small stepper motor to turn the dial, an optical sensor to keep track of how much the stepper motor is turning (and by extension, the dial), a mechanism that tries to lift the shackle, a sensor that can detect if an attempt to life the shackle has failed, and an Arduino to be the brains of the operation....
Media Platforms Design Team(Credit: All Photos by Reaction Engines) British firm Reaction Engines is building a plane that can zip almost anywhere in the world within four hours, cool itself by 1000 degrees Celsius in a fraction of a second, and even go into space. The European Space Agency is interested in the futuristic plane as a way to lower the cost of future launches.The Most Bizarre Planes Ever MadeMedia Platforms Design TeamReaction calls the aircraft the Skylon, and it imagines the plane carrying 300 passengers at mach 5....
Media Platforms Design TeamIf a National Weather Service alert says that a Category 4 hurricane is headed your way, you know you can expect wind speeds of 131 to 155 mph and a storm surge up to 18 ft. above normal. What you don’t know is whether your windows will blow out or if the vinyl siding is going to rip off the side of your house. So, you break out the duct tape, run to the local supply store to buy plywood and hope for the best....
We’ve seen big, bulky Anti-UAV Defense Systems radio-jamming drones out of the sky before, but it looks like the Army also has a much smaller version on its hands. At this year’s Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting and Exposition (AUSA 2015), the Army Cyber Institute at West Point was demoing a rifle-sized device that can do the same thing. Here it is taking out a quadcopter: View full post on TwitterHere it is turning off a light and opening the door of a tiny little bunker: View full post on TwitterCaptain Brent Chapman, Research Scientist at the Army Cyber Institute and the guy who made the DIY cyber rifle explained the concept to me over email....
It’s been 35 years since the German economist E.F. Schumacher conceived the term “appropriate technology” to explain his assertion that grand solutions may fail to improve the daily lives of those they intend to benefit–particularly in the developing world. As leaders in the burgeoning field, like MIT’s Amy Smith and the Full Belly Project’s Jock Brandis, have discovered, simpler innovations can often go further, and on the cheap at that.But they’re not the only high-tech minds implementing low-tech fixes....
Media Platforms Design TeamDoes your martial arts training inform your work?Martial arts is actually how I got into science. I started martial arts when I was 13. Very rapidly, I got fascinated with the whole idea of what the body can do. So I became interested in human movement, and then how the nervous system works, and I ended up with a Ph.D. in neuroscience.Both your new book, Inventing Iron Man, and your first book, Becoming Batman, use superheroes to explore science....
Media Platforms Design TeamAdidas really wants us all to know that it has figured out the science of a soccer ball in flight. In fall 2013, when debuting Brazuca—the ball designed specifically for this summer’s World Cup in Brazil, officials proclaimed that the new six-panel design (the first time a soccer ball has had so few panels) was the optimal engineering for aerodynamic continuity and flight speed.Adidas said it tested the ball in wind tunnels and in games, secretly dressing the ball in panel-hiding camouflage for the international U-20 World Cup....
Media Platforms Design TeamOTHEREighty-two percent of the 238 people killed by lightning strikes from 2006 to 2012 were male. Fishing, camping, and boating, in that order, are the top three activities on the lightning-death list.FALLSMen are more than 11 times more likely than women to die on the job, because men tend to have more dangerous occupations. Consider: In 2011 falls accounted for 541 working deaths, and most of those occurred in construction, a predom inantly male industry....
There’s no “dark side” of the moon, but there is a side that we never see. It’s thanks to tidal locking, which ensures that the same side of our satellite is always facing the Earth. Now, NASA has released a stunning new visual of this hard-to-see face.Media Platforms Design TeamThe far side of the moon is a little less marked by the maria (or “seas”) than the “man on the moon” face we always see, as the NASA demonstration shows....
Media Platforms Design TeamFor Martin Birkmann, head of product planning at BMW of North America, what started as a relaxing Sunday morning stroll through Central Park ended as a public relations nightmare. Birkmann had taken an X3 prototype from his office in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey for the weekend, and was driving around his old neighborhood in Manhattan when, on a whim, he decided to go for a walk in Central Park....
Media Platforms Design TeamToday Microsoft turned its alliance with Finnish cellular giant Nokia into a marriage, announcing the acquisition of Nokia’s handset and services businesses for $7.2 billion. The two companies have been tied together since 2011, when former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop became Nokia’s CEO, then promptly replaced the handsetmaker’s aging Symbian operating system with Microsoft’s relatively new Windows Phone OS. But both companies have since struggled to gain market share in the mobile space, drowned out by devices from Apple and Samsung running iOS and Google’s Android operating systems....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat if, in response to the steadily rising tide of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean lithium-ion battery production over the past two decades, a U.S.-based company decided to open up shop and manufacture Li-ion cells? Could it be competitive? A recent study published in the Journal of Power Sources attempts to estimate the cost of such an endeavor and compares it to the cost of the same exact venture in China....
