Hasta La Gadget!

For many police officers, their cruiser’s front seat is often their office — but a parked car isn’t always a safe car. With Surveillance Mode, Ford hopes to keep your city’s finest a little safer in the heat of the night. By combining its existing driver-assist tech — backup cameras, power door locks and cross-traffic alerts — the Dearborn automaker has devised a system to signal officers of a potential attack from behind. When a potential assailant crosses into the rear camera’s viewing range, Surveillance Mode sounds a chime, the windows roll up and the doors lock. This ought to give officers valuable extra time to apprise the situation at hand. It may not be a tumbler, but it’s a start.

Oh, and don’t fret about your local black and white’s sanity: Surveillance Mode can be deactivated at will, so gaggles of pedestrians won’t set off the alarm every five minutes.

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: Ford News Center

Before the invention of the car, jaywalking wasn’t a recognized concept. Want to get across the street? Then just walk across the street—nobody’s going to stop you. But the rise of the automobile posed a new problem for people of the early 20th century. While the median state-designated speed limit for American cities was just 10 miles per hour in 1906, the pace of American streets soon increased enough that people who wanted to cross them were suddenly putting themselves in harm’s way. So cities across the U.S. started to regulate where and when pedestrians could cross. You can see the faint pedestrian crosswalk lines painted on the street in the scene below from Detroit circa 1917.

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Jeff Bezos’ expeditionary team already believes that it’s recovering Apollo 11 engines from the ocean, but it now has firm evidence that it’s on the right track. The group has just found a serial number (pictured above) linking a salvaged thrust chamber to the fifth F-1 engine on Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket. While there’s more identification work to go, the discovery shows that Bezos’ conservation project is paying off. The timing is also rather convenient — it gives us a fitting tribute to the NASA explorers that reached the Moon 44 years ago.

Filed under: Transportation, Science, Alt, Amazon

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Source: Bezos Expeditions

You may remember the urban legend that claimed that American Airlines saved $70,000 per year by simply removing one olive from each of its salads. It sounds too good to be true, since the airline made a change that passengers wouldn’t notice that would save thousands of dollars. However, United Airlines is making a similar breakthrough that isn’t an urban legend.

United Airlines has installed split scimitar winglets to its Boeing 737-800 plane and took it for a test flight. It was a successful run and the airline has decided to implement the winglets on all of their Boeing 737 planes. The winglets are designed to improve aerodynamic efficiency by routing air around it, thus cutting down on drag and using less fuel.

Boeing says this will cut fuel costs by 2% when factoring in only the 737 fleet, but along with their Boeing 757 and 767 fleet (who already have last-generation winglets installed), United Airlines says this will save them $200 million per year in fuel costs. That’s an incredible savings for just a little bit of added metal to the airplane wing (although that isn’t counting the money spent on R&D for the new winglet).

Of course, winglets have been around for awhile now, and several airlines use them, but this new split scimitar winglet is said to be much improved over the current models, providing even more efficiency. The winglets essentially add another fin to the plane’s wing that faces downward, adding to the current winglet that points upward on the plane. The added winglet further reduce the vortices formed behind the wing, which increases performance even more than just having the upward-pointing winglets.

The new winglets will begin to roll out to the Boeing 737 United fleet starting at some point early next year, as further testing is still needed, as well as approval and certification from the FAA is still underway.

SOURCE: United Airlines

United Airlines Boeing 737 fleet getting new winglets to cut fuel costs by millions is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Earlier this week, Elon Musk announced that he would publish an alpha design for his crazy-sounding "Hyperloop" by August 12. According to Musk, the diagram above is as close as anyone has gotten to figuring out how the super-fast transit technology might work. And it seems bonkers.

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