Apr 02
Bad news for those carrying a few extra pounds: Samoa Air has become the world’s first airline to introduce a pricing policy which charges passengers by body weight. Time to diet. More »
Mar 25
No, that is not a message sent from the future by James T. Kirk, warning us to treat the whales nicely. You’re looking at 30 lit quadcopter robots forming a Starfleet insignia in the night sky above London, just because they can.
I don’t care that it is a publicity stunt. This is a great use of robots. The promotional event for the new Trek movie coincided with Saturday night’s Earth Hour, which was meant to encourage people to take one hour and to conserve electricity.
It’s totally okay to use electricity to make robots form a Federation symbol while others save it. I’m cool with that. It was an amazing once in a lifetime geek event. I wish I could have seen this up close and personal, as I’m sure the video doesn’t do it justice.
[via Geekosystem]
Mar 25
I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen an R/C plane fly like this one does. That’s because it is one of a kind. This plane dances and does an amazing ballet in the air thanks to user-edited software and an ultra-light fuselage.
Dutch R/C plane enthusiast Nando Te Riele wanted an airplane that was responsive enough to coordinate its movements with music. Mission accomplished. Check out the video to see how graceful this thing is as it dances and twirls without a care in the world. It is really amazing to watch.
Riele installed lights on the wings to augment the plane’s graceful movements. I think we have hit upon a new geeky form of allet that I would actually pay to see. The performance took place at this year’s Electric Indoor Masters meeting, an event that showcases some of the best indoor R/C plane pilots in the world.
[via Geek]
Mar 21
American Airlines has been leading the charge when it comes to replacing old-fashioned paper with new-fashioned iPads, and the flight into a paperless future just took a big step. American Airlines is the first airline to have the iPad replace the bulky, Jepperson manuals, eliminating around 40 pounds of paper in total. This is what that freedom looks like. More »
Mar 02
Man wasn’t meant to fly, but we have certainly managed to find many ways to do just that. Now Fritz Unger from Germany has found yet another way to soar like an eagle.
His project is called Project Skyflash, not project “Oh my god. How do I land this thing!” He is getting closer to putting himself into the air with his insane homemade jetpack. The pack uses twin turbine engines – the type that you would normally find in R/C jets.
The goal? To launch a human 25,000 feet into the sky from ground level. It’s an ambitious project and the videos are fascinating to watch. Let’s just hope that when they do get to that height, everything goes smoothly.
It’s nice to see that in this day and age we can still dream big.
[via Obvious Winner]
Feb 28
There once was a Golden Age Of Flying. You didn’t have to queue up, strip down, and surrender your beverage to the Goon Squad. Meals were served on real plates instead of sad, soggy cardboard boxes. The act of traveling itself was a pleasant part of the journey—instead of a necessary act of mass-transit. These conveniences still exist for the very rich, but there was a time when all of us had access to a fantastic world in the sky. That world is never coming back, but it’s still nice to look back and fondly remember. More »
Feb 22
This robotic bat wing was developed by Wayne Enterprises – I mean Brown University. Because you need a wing if you want to build a bat. In fact, you need two. Right now, it is just a wing, but with this wing they can learn more about the aerodynamics of bat wings and how bat flight works.
The wing isn’t identical to the natural wing of the lesser dog-faced bat that it is based on, but close enough for studying how they work.Check out the video to see it in action.
Whatever mad creation they intend to spring on the world, it will have bat wings and probably suck our blood. Thankfully, they haven’t gotten that far yet. They can put it on a real bat later just for laughs. Or maybe a rat. Or an octopus. That would be horrifying.
[via Geekosystem]
Feb 22
By all logic bats shouldn’t be able to fly. They’re basically rats with wings, yet somehow they manage to soar through the air, and researchers at Brown University have finally figured out how. But since they’re not the easiest animals to work with, Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz created this biologically accurate robotic bat wing that perfectly mimics the creature’s motions. More »
Feb 22
Flying can be a white-knuckle affair for even the heartiest of travelers. But it turns out what you should really fear are airports; almost 60 percent of all aircraft incidents happen there during taxiing, take-off, approach or landing. Here are runway horrorshows from around the globe that may make you rethink your next trip. More »
Feb 14
There was some uproar about the possibility of using unarmed drones over US soil to locate that cop turned killer fugitive, but maybe that’s because drones have a bad rap because of all of the bombs they’ve been known to drop. Now, engineers at FliteTest are trying to make a kinder, gentler drone, the kind that captures artsy images.
The Lomo-Copter is a remote-controlled tricopter, outfitted with a medium-format Diana F+ Lomography camera with an instant back and remote-triggering mechanism. This brings fuzzy, light-leaky, and vignette stylized imagery to secret spy footage.
The Lomo-Copter also has another camera mounted to the Lomo-cam’s viewfinder, which transmits real-time footage to the operator’s stylish goggles for first-person-view operation of the drone, so they can snap pictures remotely with the old-school analog camera. Here’s a comparison of the FPV goggles and a Lomo print:
So if you’re worried about drones flying over your neighborhood, don’t be because some of them are actually pretty nice, and they might just Instagram you some photos of your garden gnomes.
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