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Category: transportation – Page 258

SEOUL, Dec 11 (Reuters) — Teen pilot Zara Rutherford landed in Seoul on Saturday from Russia, the first Asia stop on her attempt to become the youngest woman to fly around the world solo.

In August, the 19-year-old British-Belgian departed from Kortrijk-Wevelgem Airport in western Belgium on her 51,000-km (32,000-mile) journey, which is to span five continents and 52 countries, including the United States, Greenland, Russia and Colombia.

“It has been challenging,” Rutherford told reporters at Gimpo International Airport after arriving from Vladivostok in her bespoke Shark ultralight plane, the world’s fastest microlight.

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Thousands of feet beneath the surface of Monterey Bay off California, scientists recently captured footage of a fish with a bulbous, translucent head and green orb-like eyes that peer out through its forehead.

This bizarre creature, known as a barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma), is very rarely seen. Researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have only spotted the species nine times, despite having sent their remotely operated vehicles (ROV) on more than 5,600 dives in the fish’s habitat, MBARI tweeted on December 9.

But last week, a team of scientists deployed MBARI’s ROV Ventana and caught sight of a barreleye fish suspended in the water.

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Hermeus, a Georgia-based aviation startup, has announced a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop its idea for a hypersonic aircraft engine. The Air Force department funding the project is the Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate, the team that manages Air Force One. A Mach 5 aircraft could allow the president to fly from New York to London in 90 minutes, instead of the 7 hours it takes today.

✈ You like badass planes. We like badass planes. Let’s nerd out over them together.

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Mercedez-Benz has announced approval of their “Drive Pilot” system, in Germany, which does fully autonomous operation in highway traffic jam situations. Such systems have been promised for many years. It’s interesting to note that Tesla TSLA-5.2%, which might be able to produce such a system today, has instead put all their focus on their poorly named “full” self-driving product, possibly at the expense of other features like this.

The German certification is designed to be extended to the rest of the world, starting of course with Europe. Honda has sold a modest number of Legend sedans in Japan with this function, and Audi produced one but did not finish the regulatory approval process.

A system like this sometimes called a “level 3” system though those levels are misleading and not typically used by leading self-driving developers. It got that number as a potential half step between driver-assist (Such as Tesla FSD and other Mercedes offerings) and real self-driving. It was dreamed up by regulators with no experience in developing self-driving systems and there’s been a lot of disparate thinking about it over the years.

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Rolls-Royce, the 115-year-old iconic British Engineering firm, has now achieved a new feat. After manufacturing world-class jet engines, it has left its mark in the electric aviation world.

Spirit of Innovation, a single-seat, electric-powered propeller plane built by Rolls-Royce, obliterated the zero-emission speed record, reaching over 556 kilometers per hour (345 mph) over a three-kilometer distance—and even maxing out at 623 kilometers per hour. This flight successfully smashed all previous records of electric planes which are environment friendly.

With a clarion call given by the COP26 on the need to cut emissions, Rolls-Royce has presented itself as a company that could earnestly provide that solution. With the aviation industry registering a record number of flights after a year of lockdowns, the emissions are set to grow further.

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Microsoft’s attempts to steer Windows users toward the Edge browser are attracting notice. Can the Third Browser War around the corner?

Users of Microsoft’s Windows 10 and 11 operating systems have recently reported seeing unusual prompts when they attempt to download Google’s Chrome browser to their device, according to The Verge.

If Microsoft is indeed launching a third Browser War, can the mid-1990s be far behind? Men, put on your flat-front chinos or straight-leg jeans, women, put on a mini-skirt and knee socks, pop a disc with “The Macarena” into your car’s sound system, and head for the mall. There, Toy Story or Braveheart is playing, and you can stop by Starbucks for their new frozen Frappuccino.

If you’re lucky enough to have a home computer, a new company called eBay is selling Pez dispensers, and another new company named Amazon has just sold its first book: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.

Full Story:

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While 1% of anything doesn’t sound like much, with light, that’s still really fast — close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.

Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 km/h), more than three times the speed of sound. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane 0, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 km/h). That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light.

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The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.

This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.

First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.

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