The unique Icon A5 seaplane can turn any lake into an airport! ✈🌊.
Category: transportation – Page 412
Scientists developing ice-repelling laser treatment for airplanes
While it’s important to keep the wings of aircraft ice-free, the application of chemical deicers before takeoff can be problematic. German scientists are working on something that could help, in the form of an ice-repelling laser-based treatment for flight surfaces.
As many people will know from firsthand experience, waiting for an airliner to be sprayed with copious amounts of deicer is a hassle, potentially delaying takeoff. What’s more, the chemicals used can be quite expensive, plus they’re typically not very eco-friendly.
In order to allow smaller amounts of deicer to do the same job, some aircraft now incorporate heating elements in key areas of their fuselage, or they use setups that divert hot air from their engines to those same areas. The new system is intended to further minimize the need for deicers, perhaps even making them completely unnecessary.
Dodge Charger “Batmobile” Rendered, Looks Like Robert Pattinson’s Next Ride
It was with great pleasure that I glared at the rather revealing Batmobile teasers The Batman director Matt Reeves shared last week. The superhero’s future ride, previewed after we caught a glimpse at his future Batcycle, leaves the mechanical monster look of its recent predecessors behind, drawing inspiration from the contemporary muscle car customization culture instead.
8 photos.
New Battery Technology Could Lead to Self-Powered Devices
The advancements that are being made in battery technology are pretty mind boggling. We are seeing devices that are drawing power from just about every source that is imaginable, and now there is battery technology from researchers at Imperial College London that may actually have devices that create their own power. From cell phones to cars and everything in between, there may eventually be nothing more needed that to actually use the device.
This incredible new battery technology works because of the material that is being used in the actual construction of the items. The reason that the new material is making headlines is because of the fact that it can be integrated into the design of an automobile and would make it lighter and more fuel efficient, but could actually supply power to recharge the battery of an electric car.
With the material being able to be strong enough for the construction of a car, there are many other possibilities for its use. Right off the bat, devices such as cell phones, iPods, laptops and anything else that you can think of that would use battery power would be able to benefit from this new battery technology.
Researchers create portable black hole
Essentially from a disposal device to even warp drive hoverboards to even like gravity field control to even like hovering spaceships.
Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.
The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv1.
Black holes are normally too massive to be carried around. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, for example, has a mass around 3.6 million times that of the Sun and warps the very space around it. Light that travels too close to it can become trapped forever.
Stanford’s AI Index Report: How Much Is BS?
Another important question is the extent to which continued increases in computational capacity are economically viable. The Stanford Index reports a 300,000-fold increase in capacity since 2012. But in the same month that the Report was issued, Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s AI head, warned that “The rate of progress is not sustainable…If you look at top experiments, each year the cost is going up 10-fold. Right now, an experiment might be in seven figures but it’s not going to go to nine or 10 figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that.”
AI has feasted on low-hanging fruit, like search engines and board games. Now comes the hard part — distinguishing causal relationships from coincidences, making high-level decisions in the face of unfamiliar ambiguity, and matching the wisdom and commonsense that humans acquire by living in the real world. These are the capabilities that are needed in complex applications such as driverless vehicles, health care, accounting, law, and engineering.
Despite the hype, AI has had very little measurable effect on the economy. Yes, people spend a lot of time on social media and playing ultra-realistic video games. But does that boost or diminish productivity? Technology in general and AI in particular are supposed to be creating a new New Economy, where algorithms and robots do all our work for us, increasing productivity by unheard-of amounts. The reality has been the opposite. For decades, U.S. productivity grew by about 3% a year. Then, after 1970, it slowed to 1.5% a year, then 1%, now about 0.5%. Perhaps we are spending too much time on our smartphones.