MIT Prez: Discrimination Against Scholars Of Chinese Descent Is ‘Heartbreaking’
Posted in: Today's ChiliL. Rafael Reif penned an open letter to the MIT community in support of his Chinese and Chinese American colleagues.
Randall Park Is A Proud BTS Stan
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe “Always Be My Maybe” star said the K-pop group made him “proud to be Korean.”
A lengthy Wall Street Journal article described design chief Jony Ive leaving Apple as a process that started long before it was announced last week, and specifically linked it to issues with CEO Tim Cook. The article claimed Ive was “dispirited” by…
Team studies drone strikes on airplanes by firing them into a wall at 500 MPH
Posted in: Today's ChiliBird strikes are a very real danger to planes in flight, and consequently aircraft are required to undergo bird strike testing — but what about drones? With UAV interference at airports on the rise, drone strike testing may soon be likewise mandatory, and if it’s anything like what these German researchers are doing, it’ll involve shooting the craft out of air cannons at high speed.
The work being done at Fraunhofer EMI in Freiburg is meant to establish some basic parameters for how these things ought to be tested.
Bird strikes, for example, are tested by firing a frozen poultry bird like a chicken or turkey out of an air cannon. It’s not pretty, but it has to be done. Even so, it’s not a very good analogue to a drone strike.
“From a mechanical point of view, drones behave differently to birds and also weigh considerably more. It is therefore uncertain, whether an aircraft that has been successfully tested against bird strike, would also survive a collision with a drone,” explained Fraunhofer’s Sebastian Schopferer in a news release.
The team chose to load an air cannon up with drone batteries and engines, since those make up most of any given UAV’s mass. The propellers and arms on which they’re mounted are generally pretty light and will break easily — compared with a battery weighing the better part of a kilogram, they won’t add much to the damage.
The remains of a drone engine and battery after being propelled into the plate on the left at hundreds of miles per hour.
The drones were fired at speeds from 250 to 570 miles per hour (115 to 255 meters per second by their measurement) at aluminum plates of up to 8 millimeters of thickness. Unsurprisingly, there was “substantial deformation” of the plates and the wingless drones were “completely destroyed.” Said destruction was recorded by a high-speed camera, though unfortunately the footage was not made available.
It’s necessary to do a variety of tests to determine what’s practical and what’s unnecessary or irrelevant — why spend the extra time and money firing the drones at 570 when 500 does the same level of damage? Does including the arms and propellers make a difference? At what speed is the plate in danger of being pierced, necessitating additional protective measures? And so on. A new rig is being constructed that will allow acceleration (and deceleration) of larger UAVs.
With enough testing the team hopes that not only could such things be standardized, but simulations could be built that would allow engineers to virtually test different surfaces or materials without a costly and explosive test rig.
Private American space robotics company Astrobotic has received a $5.6 million contract from NASA to help develop an autonomous lunar rover called MoonRanger. The development will take place in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, according to Astrobotic, which received the contract under NASA’s Lunar Surface and Instrumentation Technology Payload (LSITP) program. NASA is planning a future Moon mission under the … Continue reading
Tim Cook has hit out at reports that Apple’s design division is in disarray – and that he himself is detached from new product design – after the news that Jony Ive will leave the company. Ive announced last week that he was stepping down as Chief Design Officer of Apple, bringing to an end a career with the firm … Continue reading
The Challenge of Making and Marketing Spider-Man: Far From Home, When No One Could Know What It Was About
Posted in: Today's ChiliSpider-Man being dead wasn’t a huge problem. One would think killing the main character of a movie about year before its release would be exactly that but, for the team behind Spider-Man: Far From Home, it was not. Instead, it was just the first part of a long-in-place plan to raise the stakes for not just one movie,…
The 10 Best Deals of July 1, 2019
Posted in: Today's ChiliWe see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
Keanu Reeves has always been great. That said, we are truly living in the golden age of the Keanu Renaissance. So much so that someone has created a DIY, portable Keanu gif player, because why resign yourself to merely imagining his glory, when you can watch multiple ten-second clips of it?