Not only are people still coming up with new drone applications, but they are also still coming up with new drone designs. How about the SQUID drone that is launched from a cannon mounted in the bed of a moving truck. Once the SQUID reached a certain altitude, it deploys and flies away like a ‘normal’ drone.
100% Solar Yachts are catching on in a big way. Impressive.
Specifications Length overall: 13,40 m (44‘) Beam overall: 7,2 (23.6‘) Draft: 0,75 m (2.5‘) Light displacement (EC): 11 tons Water: 500 – 1.000 L Waste-Water: 1 × 250 L Fuel: 250 – 500 L Solar Panels: 9 kWp E-Motors:
The idea tiptoes closer to the original concept of time crystals, first proposed in 2012.
While propeller planes certainly do have their place, sometimes the extra speed and thrust of a jet engine is what’s really needed. Dallas, Texas-based FusionFlight has applied that sort of thinking to quadcopter-style drones, resulting in the AB5 JetQuad.
According to the company, the AB5 is “the world’s smallest and most powerful jet-powered drone with vertical take-off and landing [VTOL] capabilities.”
Instead of the usual four electric motors and propellers, the current prototype has four diesel-powered microturbine jet engines which produce a combined 200 horsepower (149 kW) at full throttle. Thanks to a proprietary vectoring system known as the H-Configuration, the thrust from these engines can be directed either to move the drone vertically when taking off and landing, or horizontally while in flight.
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A team of scientists working with the Murchison Widefield Array (WMA) radio telescope are trying to find the signal from the Universe’s first stars. Those first stars formed after the Universe’s Dark Ages.
NASA astronaut Nicole Stott examines scenes depicting space from movies and television and breaks down how accurate they really are. What actually happens when your helmet cracks in space like in Total Recall? Are the spacewalks in Gravity realistic? Could there really be AI on a space station like in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
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NASA astronaut breaks down space scenes from film & TV | WIRED
Medication prescribed for a certain type of epilepsy may offer a new method for treating malignant infantile brain tumors. A specific mTOR inhibitor has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier to both reach and attack the tumor at source. This has been demonstrated by researchers from Uppsala University, in collaboration with US and UK colleagues, whose research has now been published in the scientific journal Cell Stem Cell.
Approximately 100 children suffer infantile brain tumors in Sweden each year. The most common type of malignant brain tumor in infants and children is medulloblastoma. Radiation therapy is part of the standard treatment for medulloblastomas and modern radiation therapy has saved the lives of many children suffering from these often aggressive cancers; however, as it often comes with serious side effects for healthy brain tissue, it is seldom prescribed for infants. Although a presumably better solution would be to give more targeted treatment, in order to establish such a therapy it would naturally need to be proven to be both more effective and come with fewer side effects than current treatments.
Many infantile medulloblastomas are amplified by MYCN, an oncogene that drives tumor growth and metastasis to the spinal column, leading to a very poor prognosis. In the study in question, the researchers cultivated a particular type of neural stem cell and were able to demonstrate that MYCN was quickly able to turn these into cancer cells. This suggests that these cells are likely to be the origin of infantile medulloblastomas.
Before now, scientists did not think it was possible for a stellar black hole to have a mass larger than 20 times that of the sun, an approximation based on their understanding of the way stars evolve and die in the Milky Way.
But that assumption was metaphorically crushed in the gravity of a “monster” black hole that a group of Chinese-led international scientists discovered inside our own galaxy. The hole has a mass 70 times that of the sun, researchers said in their study published in the journal Nature.
Astronomers from CSIRO and Curtin University have used pulsars to probe the Milky Way’s magnetic field. Working with colleagues in Europe, Canada, and South Africa, they have published the most precise catalogue of measurements towards mapping our Galaxy’s magnetic field in 3D.
The Milky Way’s magnetic field is thousands of times weaker than Earth’s, but is of great significance for tracing the paths of cosmic rays, star formation, and many other astrophysical processes. However, our knowledge of the Milky Way’s 3D structure is limited.
Dr. Charlotte Sobey, the lead author of the research paper, said “We used pulsars (rapidly-rotating neutron stars) to efficiently probe the Galaxy’s magnetic field in 3D. Pulsars are distributed throughout the Milky Way, and the intervening material in the Galaxy affects their radio-wave emission.”
