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Meet the UDrone: a clever quadcopter that you can control with your thoughts or simple hand gestures. You can activate its camera by blinking or making the “V” hand gesture. The drone has subject & facial tracking, 3 adjustable speed settings, and an auto-flight control system.
The UDrone is easy to use: simply imagine it taking off and once you are concentrated enough, the drone will take off. It has mobile app control too.
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Sports car maker Bugatti (Molsheim, France) used SLM Solutions’ (Lübeck, Germany) metal additive manufacturing technology to produce automotive components. The components were manufactured in the aerospace alloy Ti6Al4V in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Additive Manufacturing Technologies (Fraunhofer IAPT; Hamburg, Germany) and Bionic Production (Lüneburg, Germany) on a SLM 500 selective laser melting system featuring four 400 W lasers.
A caliper test showed that additively produced metal components can cope with extreme strength, stiffness, and temperature requirements at speeds of over 375 km/h with a braking force of 1.35 g and brake disc temperatures up to 1100°C, says Frank Götzke, Head of New Technologies at Bugatti. The test also showed that a tensile strength of 1250 N/mm and a material density over 99.7% was achieved.
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A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews (St Andrews, Scotland) has achieved a breakthrough in the measurement of lasers that they say could revolutionize the future of fiber-optic communications. They also say the wavelength meter (or wavemeter) will boost optical and quantum sensing technology, enhance the performance of next-generation sensors, and expand the information-carrying capacity of fiber-optic networks.
A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews has achieved a breakthrough in the measurement of lasers which could revolutionise the future of fiber-optic communications.
The new research, published in Optics Letters (Wednesday 6 March), reveals the team of scientists has developed a low-cost and highly-sensitive device capable of measuring the wavelength of light with unprecedented accuracy.
The wavemeter development will boost optical and quantum sensing technology, enhancing the performance of next generation sensors and the information-carrying capacity of fiber-optic communications networks.
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Engineers want the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge to last 120 years… And it just might. (via Seeker)
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In April of 2019 Google+ is going away. However, if you have stuff that you really want to save someone created a workaround. You can now move your content to Discourse.
Google+ is dead. Granted people have been saying that much for years now, but this time it’s really true. As of April, Google’s social media experiment will officially go the way of Reader, Buzz, Wave, Notebook, and all the other products that the search giant decided they were no longer interested in maintaining. Unfortunately in the case of Google+, the shutdown means losing a lot of valuable content that was buried in the “Communities” section of the service. Or at least that’s what we all thought.
Thanks to the efforts of [Michael Johnson], many of those Google+ communities now have a second chance at life. After taking a deep dive into the data from his own personal Google+ account, he realized it should be possible to write some code that would allow pulling the content out of Google’s service and transplanting it into a Discourse instance. With some more work, he was even able to figure out how to preserve the ownership of the comments and posts. This is no simple web archive; you can actually log into Discourse with your Google account and have all of your old content attributed to you.
To date, [Michael] has managed to transplant over 40,000 posts and around into “The Maker Forums”. With a few more weeks until the lights officially go out over at Google+, he says there’s still time to scrape more data out of the service if anyone has suggestions on maker-related content that they think is worthy of preservation. Of course, as all the code for the project as been released as open source, there’s still hope for the non-technical Communities should anyone want to spearhead the effort to duplicate those as well.