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Category: engineering – Page 109

A research team led by scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has recently designed a structured thermal armor (STA) that achieves efficient liquid cooling even over 1,000°C, fundamentally solving a 266-year-old challenge presented by the Leidenfrost effect. This breakthrough can be applied in aero and space engines, as well as improve the safety and reliability of next-generation nuclear reactors.

The research has been led by Professor Wang Zuankai from CityU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE), Professor David Quéré from the PSL Research University, France, and Professor Yu Jihong, Director of the International Center of Future Science, Jilin University and Senior Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at CityU.

The findings were published in the latest issue of the highly prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Read more | >

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.

Christie Maddock, a lecturer in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Strathclyde, says that the “alluring concept” has been around for nearly a century.

Continue reading “Single-stage-to-orbit: How the holy grail of spaceflight could soon become reality” | >

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

The impact of a nuclear bomb dropped in a big city has been simulated by Neil Halloran and the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Watch the video to see it.

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.

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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.

Read more | >

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.

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we meet Shely Aronov, CEO and founder at InnerPlant, and chat about what plants say, and how farmers can understand their messages.

Links:

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.

In a letter obtained by Reuters, the CEOs of several passenger and cargo airlines in the United States, including Delta, United, and Southwest Airlines, warned that signals from the two companies’ new C-Band 5G cell towers could interfere with navigation and safety equipment on their planes.

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.

His co-authors are from UNSW Sydney, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), and RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility.

Read more | >

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.

“Solar geoengineering deployment cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive and effective manner,” said the researchers in a letter that was further supported by a commentary in the journal WIREs Climate Change.

“We, therefore, call for immediate political action from governments, the United Nations and other actors to prevent the normalization of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option.”

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.

The Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference (APEC) was founded to allow experts to explore forbidden (and even crazy) concepts that go beyond the boundaries of current contemporary science.

Continue reading “Researchers from DARPA, NASA and MIT working to develop Anti-Gravity technologies” | >