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On-demand drone delivery specialist Flytrex releases booming activity growth for 2021 in three North Carolina communities it serves.

While the development of all kinds of next-generation aviation and UAV activity merits the attention it attracts, the reality is a lot of what’s afoot is still in early-phase operation or testing. That work-in-progress status makes seeing quantified metrics in advanced applications like those released today by drone delivery specialist Flytrex particularly useful in measuring rates of progress.

The marquee stats Flytrex published include over 12,000 orders its automated drones delivered to backyards in its North Carolina zone of operation in 2021 – more than any other company in the US, it says. That activity was the densest on New Year’s Eve, when orders flowed in at the rate of one per 6.5 minutes, requiring the company to have three UAVs flying at once.

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Astronomers have just found an absolute monster of a galaxy.

Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That’s 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.

The discovery highlights our poor understanding of these colossi, and what drives their incredible growth. But it could provide a pathway to better understanding, not just of giant radio galaxies, but the intergalactic medium that drifts in the yawning voids of space.

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Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of . This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

“For this class of materials that’s extremely important, because their functional properties are associated with their structure,” said Yijing Huang, a Stanford University graduate student who played an important role in the experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “By changing the nature of the light you put in, you can tailor the nature of the material you create.”

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With marine debris a growing concern, innovators are getting creative — designing autonomous boats that act as on-the-water trash-eating machines.

The latest development comes from the Danish company RanMarine Technology. They’ve created an aquadrone called WasteShark that sucks up waste from the water much like a Roomba — consuming up to 200 liters of garbage in a single ride.

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In order to come up with their design, MAHLE said it used a state-of-the-art simulation process that allowed it to adjust and combine the parameters of different motor designs incrementally in order to settle on the optimal solution. The company says this new method allows it to “quickly create the necessary technical conditions in order to advance e-mobility in a sustainable manner worldwide.”

Though the new motor design was conceived using the very latest simulation processes, the inception of induction motors dates back to the 19th century when they were invented by Nikola Tesla. A new electric vehicle development, EV-charging roads, similarly builds on the inventor’s early work on alternating currents.

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