A Personal Electric Airplane That Won't Need A Runway

More than half of all personal aircraft accidents occur during takeoffs or landings. That’s why inventor and entrepreneur JoeBen Bevirt—known for designing airplane-like wind energy turbines—is intent on making runways obsolete. Bevirt, 40, has mobilized his wind energy team to create a personal electric airplane called S2 that takes off vertically, like a helicopter, and flies aerodynamically, like an airplane.

No full-scale prototype exists yet, but Bevirt and his team have built about two dozen 10-pound models to demonstrate their concept works. NASA has taken notice and is now funding the development of a 55-pound unmanned aerial vehicle. Supercomputer simulations of a full-scale, 1,700-pound S2 suggest it could fly two people about 200 miles (New York City to Boston) in an hour on 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or roughly equivalent to 1.5 gallons of fuel used by a typical two-seat airplane—which would make the new aircraft about five times more efficient.

S2 wouldn’t have been possible just a decade ago, says Bevirt, who believes new compact and efficient motors, ever-increasing power density in batteries, smarter control systems, and tinier sensors mean his plane will soon be a reality. “There has never been a better time to be an aircraft designer,” he says. 

SAFETY AND EFFICIENCY

A dozen compact electric motors operate three times more efficiently than a typical personal airplane’s combustion engines. Bonus: More motors improve redundancy and lower the risk of accidents.

FLEXIBILITY

Retractable arms reposition the motors to transition between vertical takeoff, forward flight, and landing.

CONTROL

Computers adjust motor speed 4,000 times per second to optimize efficiency, reduce noise, and improve flight control.

Lead Inventor: JoeBen Bevirt

Development Cost To Date: "Several million dollars"

Company: Joby Aviation

Charge Gadgets With Your Footsteps

Each thud of a hiker’s heel releases enough energy to illuminate a light bulb. Rather than waste that power, Matt Stanton, an engineer and avid backpacker, created a shoe insole that stores it as electricity. The device promises to be an improvement over traditional, hefty power packs as well as solar chargers, which work slowly or not at all, depending on the weather.

Stanton worked closely with Hahna Alexander, a fellow Carnegie Mellon University engineering student, over three years to create the SolePower system. Instead of using piezoelectric and other inefficient, bulky methods of generating electricity, the pair shrunk down components similar to those found in hand-cranked flashlights. The result is a near standard–size removable insole that weighs less than five ounces, including a battery pack, and charges electronics via USB.

SolePower’s current version, to be released later this year, requires a lengthy 15-mile walk to charge a smartphone. But Stanton says the company is working toward a design that can charge an iPhone after less than five miles of hiking and withstand about 100 million footsteps of wear and tear. 

How It Works:

1) A drivetrain converts the energy of heel strikes into rotational energy, spinning magnetic rotors.

2) The motion of the rotors induces an electrical current within coils of wire.

3) Electricity travels along a wire and into a lithium-ion polymer battery pack on a wearer’s shoelaces.

Lead inventors: Hahna Alexander, Matt Stanton

Development cost to date: $300,000

Company: Sole Power LLC

360-Degree Infrared Vision

Michael Dortch was building video surveillance trailers for industrial parks in Colorado when his clients started asking for near-omniscient views of their properties. They wanted to see intruders in the dark from all angles, but such coverage required up to seven thermal infrared cameras and cost more than $100,000. So Dortch and a colleague spent four years developing a cheaper, more capable alternative. Their Thermal Radar system provides 360-degree infrared coverage that can spot people, fires, vehicles, and more.

The heart of the invention is a single, spinning thermal sensor. Onboard processors constantly stitch images together for a refreshing panoramic video feed, and intelligent software finds threats.

A finished unit will cost about $16,000—many times cheaper than any system that comes close—and should be ready for its debut later this year. The first and biggest market will be corporate security. But the forest service, the Utah Department of Transportation, and even the Pentagon, Dortch says, also have his invention on their radar. 

How It Works:

Warm objects—people, car engines, tires, etc.—emit infrared light.

A spinning camera takes up to 16 thermal images per second, eliminating the need for multiple, expensive cameras.

Software stitches the images together and heat signatures are triangulated with GPS to show their location as a blip on a radar-like applet.

Lead inventors: Michael Dortch, Larry Price

Development cost to date: $3.7 Million

Company: Thermal Imaging Radar LLC

Chip Implanted in the Brain to Help Control Your PC

According to Intel, its customers would soon have the possibility to have a computer chip implanted into their brains so they would operate computers, mobile phones, TV and more, using their thoughts, without any physical interaction.

Currently the company's new invention is being developed at its lab located in Pittsburg, USA. The chip will be able to feel brain activity with the help of a special technology based onFunctional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). Scientists at Intel have not yet developed such a chip but according to one of the company's researchers Dean Pomerleau these are close.

Theoretically, different people thinking of the same word or image would have the same activity in their brains, but since no one really knows exactly how the brain works, this is not certain.

With the help of FMRI, Pomerleau together with his colleagues scanned the brains of volunteers in order to see whether brain patters match when people are thinking about the same things. It is worth mentioning that in theory different people that think of a similar word of picture have similar brain activity, informs Physorg. However, such theory cannot be proved since no one yet knows how exactly our brain works.

The research team says that up till now the results look rather promising. According to the lead researcher, in a decade or so people will be more inclined towards the company’s new invention implanted into their brains.

In 10 to 15 years it would be possible for people to operate hybrid computers by making use of a combination of new technology and living tissue, considers Associate Professor Charles Higgins of theUniversity of Arizona. His statement comes after scientists at the University managed to come up with a robot that is controlled by the eyes and brain of a moth. In the near future Intel's new invention could help people with some physical disabilities

Software that Allows Writing on Screen Using Power of Mind

A team of researchers managed to develop a software program that allows writing letters and number on the screen by simply thinking about them. The new invention developed by scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville can be a great step towards a new type of communication that can prove to be useful for millions of people with paralysis and various neurological conditions.

Researchers discovered that people were able to make letters appear on the display by focusing on a specific letter when it was shown with a six-by-six grid of symbols. Their new invention represents the first step towards the creation of a mind-machine interface.

During trials, two patients had electrodes placed inside their skulls right on to the surface of the brain. The electrodes were placed inside the skull with the help of an incision called craniotomy. The team used these electrodes to follow the electrical signals generated by the nerve cells when a patient focused on certain figures on the matrix, reports The Daily Telegraph.

The results of the signals were then translated by a computer that ran the new software. As soon as patients focused on a specific letter, it was shown on the display. According to the researchers, in future, devices, which would be powered by the brain, would need surgery so they could be placed inside the skull. Dr. Shih considers that soon such devices could become so small that they could be easily implanted so computers could interpret signals from the patients' brains.

The first computer mouse ever created…

Forget about the modern technologies for just two seconds, forget about computer mouses with fancy wireless infra-red technologies, bluetooth compatibility or those that don’t even need to be held under the palm of your hands and can easily clip to your index finger – behold the first mouse ever to be built / created!

The mouse itself was invented by Doug Engelbart in the year 1964, at the time he and his team were heavily criticised and doubted for his idea and imagination to promote computers (especially the mouse) as a future tool of communication, rather than just a machine for writing out papers more neatly.

12TFLOPS Desktop Supercomputer

Scientists from the research group ASTRA, based in Belgium, recently presented their new desktop supercomputer, which is believed to be the world's fastest PC, being powered by six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards along with one GTX275 single-GPU card.

The desktop supercomputer was installed at the University of Antwerp. It was built to considerably accelerate the interpretation of sophisticated, 3D medical images. The computer was developed in cooperation with Tones.be and ASUS. With 13 GPUs, FASTRA II can reach a total power of 12TFLOPS.

To be able to fit all the necessary hardware in one case, the researchers ordered a special cage where all graphic cards would be stored, being connected to the motherboard with the help of flexible riser cables. The whole system includes 4 power suppliesthat are meant to satisfy the 13 GPUs. It used at full speed,FASTRA II will be able to outrun even a moderately sized supercomputer.

With 8 graphics processors functioning in parallel, the current system is able to reach the performance of350 modern CPU cores. It would be used to carry out tomography tasks.

It would be interesting to note that this desktop supercomputer costs less than 4000 Euros.