A solar-powered aircraft has this week been plying the skies around Moffett Field in San Francisco, California, as its inventors rehearse for their next ambitious move: a coast-to-coast sunshine-fuelled flight across the US.
Posts tagged "transportation"
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Last tests for solar plane before coast-to-coast flight →
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3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production →
Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.
If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo.
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Micro jet turbine-powered Jet Vest developers seek a Kickstart →
The Bell rocket belt captured the world’s imagination when it was featured in the 1965 James Bond movie Thunderball. Now, the folks at Jet Machines Extreme (JME) are designing a modern version not powered by rockets, but by a set of four miniature turbojets. The new Jet Vest is expected to offer free flying times nearly four minutes in duration. Having run short of development money, JME is exploring another modern innovation by reaching out to crowd-funding site Kickstarter for a boost.
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For About $20, Cardboard Bicycle Could 'Change The World,' →
An Israeli inventor has come up with a way to make a bicycle almost entirely out of cardboard — and so inexpensively that he thinks retailers would only need to charge about $20 for one.
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Airbus unveils its "Smarter Skies" vision for the future of sustainable aviation →
A new report drafted by Airbus as part of its “Smarter Skies” initiative sees the aircraft manufacturing company looking toward 2050 and beyond, in order to consider what can be done to meet the expected growth in future air travel sustainably. The ambitious plans put forward include assisted take-off, free-glide landings, and aircraft flying in formation.
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Eric Schmidt: Google Self-Driving Cars Should Become The Predominant Mode Of Transport In Our Lifetime →
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt offered some new insight into Google’s self-driving car program today at his annual press talk at Allen and Co.’s Sun Valley conference.
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DARPA continues push toward high-speed aircraft with new Integrated Hypersonics program →
DARPA has repeatedly indicated an interest in developing hypersonic aircraft and weapons systems which are capable of Mach-20 speeds and thus able to reach any region of the planet within an hour. To this end, the agency has announced its new Integrated Hypersonics (IH) program, which draws upon previous research and aims to create a hypersonic X-plane (HX) ready for testing by 2016.
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A Plan For Airships That Might Finally Take Off →
“Some kids wanted to be firefighters,” Igor Pasternak says. “I always thought about blimps.” Pasternak grew up in Lviv, Ukraine, near a weather station. When he was six, he convinced the Soviet meteorologists there to let him launch one of their balloons. “I was hooked,” he says. “I wanted to build airships.”
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How Google’s Self-Driving Car Works
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The PXP Bike Lets You Switch Gears Using Brainwaves →
The PXP bike is a revolutionary carbon-fiber bicycle concept that will allow you to change gears with your mind. Although it doesn’t actually mean that all cycles will soon do away with physical switches, it does pave the way for more uses of brain-controlled products.
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China Takes Off →
The largest nation on Earth is flying more people more places than ever before. Its struggle to do so without (further) destroying the environment could show the rest of the world a greener way to travel
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Turanor PlanetSolar Solar Boat Completes its Around the World Trip →
After an amazing 18-month journey, the Turanor PlanetSolar sun-powered boat completes its around-the-world trip today! The world’s largest solar-powered boat originally launched on its worldwide trip from Monaco in September 2010 and today the boat will officially finish the trip. The Swiss-designed solar boat is powered by 537 square meters of photovoltaic panels that enabled it to travel around the world and hit spots like Miami, Cancún, Brisbane, Singapore, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi.
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The Jets of the Future →
NASA asked the world’s top aircraft engineers to solve the hardest problem in commercial aviation: how to fly cleaner, quieter and using less fuel. The prototypes they imagined may set a new standard for the next two decades of flight.
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Lasers Create Heads-up Display for Cars →
Head-up displays — like the ones in fighter jets — are appearing in cars, and lasers may make them more common and useful.
Microvision, a Redmond, Wash.-based company, is building a laser-based display that uses a red, green and blue laser as well as a mirror, which tilts to direct the beams. By adjusting the intensity of the lasers, the display produces differently colored pixels. The mirror scans horizontally and vertically, producing an image on the windshield made of lit pixels. The whole process is fast enough that the human eye can’t see the scanning, so the image looks steady.
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A Trash-Powered Plane Takes To The Skies →
A modern day Lindbergh is attempting to show us the power of a new kind of fuel by flying the length of England using only garbage to power his flight.
