It’s the holy grail of spaceflight, and it could come sooner than many expect.
This month, Washington-based Radian Aerospace announced that it’s building a spaceplane that takes off and lands horizontally. The reveal sparked excitement about what could be considered the holy grail of the decades-old industry.
What would happen if a nuclear bomb 100 times the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima hit a city of 4 million people?
#Engineering
Continue reading “Nuclear Bomb Simulation Shows How Devastating Nukes Can Be in a Major City” »
Nairobi, Kenya - Opibus has just introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya as well as the first African designed electric bus ever. This is the first major step in the company’s vision to provide a locally designed and developed electric bus that can be mass-produced for the pan-African market, by the end of 2023. This is a step towards realizing Opibus goal of electrifying Africa’s public transport system, deploying products tailored for the local use case. The bus is designed and developed in-house with local engineering talent, while at the same time utilizing local manufacturing partners.
The key to the technology is the Opibus proprietary electric vehicle platform, which is modular and can be the foundation for several types of vehicles. This enables the creation of a bus that is suitable for the African use case, in its reliability, durability and price point. This also means local and global contract manufactures can be used to create a globally competitive product, with a rapid scale-up.
Bernard Kress, principal optical architect on Microsoft’s HoloLens team, has left the company to take on the role of Director of XR Engineering at the recently formed Google Labs. A report by The Verge maintains Google is also now gearing up to produce an AR headset that could directly compete with similar offerings from the likes of Apple and Meta.
Before joining Microsoft in 2015, Kress worked as principal optical architect behind Google Glass, the company’s smartglasses that found marked success in the enterprise sector after a rocky reception by consumers in 2013.
At Microsoft, Kress continued his work—principally focused on micro-optics, wafer scale optics, holography and nanophotonics—as partner optical architect on the HoloLens team, overseeing the release of both HoloLens and HoloLens 2.
What if plants could tell us when pests are attacking them, or they’re too dry, or they need more fertilizer. One startup is gene engineering farm plants so they can communicate in in fluorescent colors. The result: a farmer’s phone, drone, or even satellite imagery can reveal what is happening in hundreds of acres of fields …
That leads to better food, fewer crop failures, and more revenue for farmers.
Continue reading “Engineering plants to talk via bioluminescence” »
They claim that more than 100,000 passengers could be affected in a single day. 🤔
#engineering
Several high-profile executives of U.S. airlines warned on Monday, January 17, of an oncoming “catastrophic” aviation crisis that will take hold by Wednesday should AT&T and Verizon activate their new 5G services, a report from Reuters reveals.
Continue reading “US Airlines Warn of a ‘Catastrophic’ Crisis Caused by New 5G Services” »
A University of Melbourne-led team has perfected a technique for embedding single atoms in a silicon wafer one-by-one. Their technology offers the potential to make quantum computers using the same methods that have given us cheap and reliable conventional devices containing billions of transistors.
“We could ‘hear’ the electronic click as each atom dropped into one of 10,000 sites in our prototype device. Our vision is to use this technique to build a very, very large-scale quantum device,” says Professor David Jamieson of The University of Melbourne, lead author of the Advanced Materials paper describing the process.
Continue reading “Building a silicon quantum computer chip atom” »
Policy experts and scientists are coming together to stop such experimentation.
Back in March of 2021, we brought you news of a study from the Bill Gates-backed Harvard University Solar Geoengineering Research Program which aimed to evaluate the efficacy of blocking sunlight from reaching our planet’s surface in order to delay the effects of climate change.
Now, more than 60 policy experts and scientists have come together to claim that these kinds of geoengineering initiatives are very dangerous for humanity, according to Phys.org.
Continue reading “Dimming the Sun Could Spell Doom for Humanity, Experts Warn” »
Anyone able to find the sources? 🤔
Antigravity is the concept of a technology that, when applied to an item or a place, allows it to “cancel” gravity rather than compensate for it, as in the case of an aircraft.
Since November 2020, a group of experts from NASA, DARPA, MIT, and the Air Force has met on Zoom on a monthly basis to explore future propulsion technology, including the possible “antigravity.” Given that this technology now exists only in science fiction or in the thoughts of a few dreamer thinkers, this is a remarkable occurrence.
As of Jan. 8, 2022, NASA’s (Washington D.C., U.S.) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments (including the 70-foot sunshield) since its Dec. 25 launch, to prepare for science operations. The telescope makes ample use of composite materials.
A joint effort with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Webb mission will explore every phase of cosmic history, from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe.
Continue reading “James Webb Space Telescope reaches major milestone as primary mirror unfolds” »
