NASA Designs All-Electric Personal Flight Vehicle

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 20, @09:36PM
from the touch-the-sky dept.

nasa

transportation

hardware

technology

MikeChino writes"NASA is currently working on a personal aircraft that will put jet packs to shame. The Puffin is an all-electric one-man airplane that could be the start of some new and amazing air travel technology. With two prop electric engines, lithium phosphate batteries and a top speed of almost 300 mph, the vertical take off and landing vehicle was originally designed for covert military insertions because it has a lower heat signature than combustion engines. The Puffin would also be super quiet – 10 times quieter than current low-noise helicopters, and since the engine is electric it has no flight ceiling and can fly up to 9,150 meters high, uninhibited by thin air ."

Sound Generator Lethal From 10 Meters

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 20, @08:52AM
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.

military

technology

penguinrecorder writes"The Thunder Generator uses a mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in turn generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 meters away. At that range, the weapon is relatively harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten meters, the Thunder Generator is capable of causing permanent damage or killing people."

Why Hasn't Earth Warmed as Much as Expected? New Report on Climate Change Explores the Reasons

ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2010) — Planet Earth has warmed much less than expected during the industrial era based on current best estimates of Earth's "climate sensitivity" -- the amount of global temperature increase expected in response to a given rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂). In a study to be published in theJournal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society, Stephen Schwartz, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and colleagues examine the reasons for this discrepancy.

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Electric Control of Aligned Spins Improves Computer Memory

ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2010) — Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and the French research facility CNRS, south of Paris, are using electric fields to manipulate the property of electrons known as "spin" to store data permanently. This principle could not only improve random access memory in computers, it could also revolutionize the next generation of electronic devices.

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Friendly Bacteria Love the Humble Apple

ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2010) — Why does an apple a day keep the doctor away? New research published in the open access journal BMC Microbiology contributes to our understanding of why eating apples is good for you.

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Sitting Down Too Long Is Bad Even If You Exercise

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday January 20, @05:02AM
from the get-a-move-on dept.

medicine

Ant tips the week-old news that sitting down too much is not good for you, even if you are otherwise fit. A blog at the LA Times reports a followup from Swedish exercise experts: they propose "establishing a new way of thinking about sedentary behavior. They suggest abolishing 'sedentary behavior' as a synonym for not exercising. Instead, sedentary time should be defined as 'muscular inactivity' to distinguish it from not doing any exercise at all." These experts warn that the excessively sedentary are running serious health risks, irrespective of how much exercise they get when they're not plonked behind a desk or lying on a sofa.