tingilinde

beyond fish ladders

fish cannons..

 

a tip of the hat to Greg

robo roach

Greg notes a robot with some cockroach inspiration.

 

magnetocaloric refrigeration

About five years ago GE showed off its work towards a practical magnetocaloric home refrigerator.  It never happened, but the principal is interesting theoretically allowing high efficiencies and getting rid of the compressor and chemical refrigerants.   More recent work at Fraunhofer hopes to realize the high efficiency using better materials.  Don't look for it any time soon, but something to watch down the road.

 

everything's a computer

Apple's lightning pins can't support h.264.. so when they needed an adapter they built a computer into it that decodes h.264 on the fly..

This twitter thread looks at the computer. Ugly and hackish, but a good example of computers in things you might not have thought about. 

(a tip of the hat to Matt)

 

heating the ground

Greg notes this piece on an interesting design problem of the London tube system.

 

artificial muscles

Greg notes a neat artificial muscle from the University of Texas at Dallas.

And then there's this   very light-weight and fast mechanism from MIT.

the stuff of Cylons.

 

Captain Corn-flower and Polly Pea-blossom

An early two horsepower recreational vehicle.

 

 

now dropbox is bloatware

It was simple and just worked .. that's changing.

a tip of the hat to John

compartmentalization

A good NY TImes piece on the Boeing 737 Max.

snip

...

But many people involved in building, testing and approving the system, known as MCAS, said they hadn’t fully understood the changes. Current and former employees at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration who spoke with The New York Times said they had assumed the system relied on more sensors and would rarely, if ever, activate. Based on those misguided assumptions, many made critical decisions, affecting design, certification and training.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said a former test pilot who worked on the Max. “I wish I had the full story.”

...

 

 

autonomous nano drones

A 27 gram autonomous drone from ETH.. 

and a preprint of the paper from the arXiv

there are clearly some downstream societal issues as these developments get more sophisticated.