Cafe X Robot Coffee Bar in San Francisco employs assembly line-style robots to build your coffee orders for you. This robot barista can make two drinks in under a minute and will get your order right every time.
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Circa 2019
NASA’s X-Plane Program has been around for 70 years. Over the course of those decades, the agency has developed a series of airplanes and rockets to test out various technologies and design advances. Now NASA has cleared the newest one, the X-59, for final assembly.
The X-59 is a supersonic aircraft design. Its full name is the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft. Rather than pushing for greater speeds or higher altitudes like some previous X-Plane’s, the X-59 is designed to break the sound barrier without the sonic boom. The X-59 will produce no more than a loud thump, if anything at all, when it passes the sound barrier.
Continue reading “NASA Will Be Building a Quiet, Supersonic Aircraft: the X-59” »
Circa 2014 o,.o.
IBM has started to flex its muscles with the Watson super computer after launching its software defined storage options for the big data era.
Seagate’s first HAMR drives will feature a whopping 20TB capacity when they debut later this year.
This craft uses laminar flow 😃
Aviation startup Boom Supersonic has unveiled a fully assembled version of its demonstrator aircraft, taking an important step forward in its efforts to build the world’s fastest airliner. The company’s XB-1 is a sleek, one-third-scale prototype of its Overture passenger plane, and is designed to break the sound barrier itself with test flights due to kick off next year.
Continue reading “Boom Supersonic reveals XB-1 plane built to break the sound barrier” »
Austrian company Cyclotech is planning to begin flight-testing an 80-kg (176-lb) demonstrator of its unique electric VTOL airframe, which uses Voith-Schneider propellers instead of rotors for exceptional agility and control in the air.
The prop design, which looks a bit like it belongs on the back of an 1850s paddle steamer, was patented nearly 100 years ago but hasn’t made it into a production aircraft yet. Each prop is a spinning cylinder whose walls are formed by a number of wing blades.
Continue reading “Cyclotech brings a totally unique propulsion system to the eVTOL world” »
Researchers at TU Graz have found a way to convert the aromatic substance vanillin into a redox-active electrolyte material for liquid batteries. The technology is an important step towards ecologically sustainable energy storage.
It is ground-breaking in the field of sustainable energy storage technology,” says Stefan Spirk from the Institute of Bioproducts and Paper Technology at Graz University of Technology. He and his team have succeeded in making redox-flow batteries more environmentally friendly by replacing their core element, the liquid electrolyte, which are mostly made up of ecologically harmful heavy metals or rare earths – with vanillin, an important ingredient of Austrian vanilla croissants.
Thanks for the niobium metal: http://www.samaterials.com/
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Do not repeat the experiments shown in this video!
So, today I will tell you about the metal that can replace gold, about niobium.
In the periodic table of chemical elements, niobium is placed in the 5th group, between vanadium and tantalum.
It got its name in the honor of Niobe, the daughter of the ancient Greek king Tantalus, and this is not a coincidence, because the properties of niobium and tantalum are very similar and at first sight they are quite hard to distinguish.
Niobium is mined from the mineral columbite, where tantalum is also present.
Because of that, until 1949 in the US, niobium was also called columbium, as in the 19th century, American scientists sometimes considered tantalum and niobium the same element and did not think about new names.
Now, when obtaining niobium from ore, it is purified from tantalum and other metals, and so pure niobium pentoxide is acquired, which is then subsequently dissolved with hydrofluoric acid, thereby obtaining complex niobium compounds.
Which are then reduced by the metallic sodium to a metallic state.
After such a process, what is obtained is a high-purity niobium which in its appearance resembles a white and a malleable metal.
If you compare its appearance with tantalum, then you can immediately see the difference in that tantalum has a more shiny surface, though it might be just the way they produce these rods.
Also niobium is about 3 times cheaper than tantalum.
Due to its high plasticity, it is easy to make a niobium foil, which is much harder to distinguish from the foil of tantalum.
Although, there is one way, as the density of niobium is almost 2 times less than that of tantalum, therefore these metals can be easily distinguished by means of scales.
A team of archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati has found that between about 2,200 and 1,000 years ago, the drinking water in this reservoir was filtered through a mixture of zeolite and coarse, sand-sized crystalline quartz. This filtration system is the oldest known example of water purification in the western hemisphere and the oldest known use of zeolite for decontaminating drinking water in the world.
