So over at NASA HQ it’s goodbye Space Shuttle, hello Space Launch System. The SLS has been designed to carry astronauts to the moon, to Mars and any other space-type destinations in between. It will be the most powerful launcher in the world, with a greater lifting capacity than the Saturn V which last carried men to the moon.
Click on the graphic for an expanded view.
NASA Space Launch System (SLS)
The new Nintendo Wii U is as much about the controller as the console. A touchscreen and motion-sensors allow game play on both the controller or on TV, where new HD graphics put it on a par with its rivals.
Read the E&T news story from earlier this month for more details about the Nintendo Wii U and rival Sony’s Playstation Vita.
Meanwhile, here’s a nice graphic explaining the Wii U.
The Nintendo Wii U console, expected in 2012
Your boring commute to work could be a thing of the past if New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin has anything to do with it. Forget the car, bus, train or subway – travel to work by jetpack.
Following over 30 years of development, Martin is aiming to have the world’s first commercially viable jetpack on sale within 18 months. The Martin Jetpack has already reached an altitude of 1,500m and is undergoing final testing.
Up, up and away – although you’ll have no excuse for being late for work if you can’t blame the traffic…
Click on the graphic for a larger view.
The Martin Jetpack
With the new F1 Formula One season underway, we thought this graphic might help race enthusiasts get a handle on what’s new and what’s banned from the circuits this time round.
It highlights the major rule changes, such as the adjustable rear wings and the reintroduction of the contentious KERS, Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems.
Click on the graphic to view an expanded version.
F1: Rule changes 2011
Eurocopter debuted the X3 hybrid prototype at the recent Paris Air Show. The X3 is a helicopter with wings, offering the speed of a turboprop-powered aircraft and the full hover-flight capabilities of a helicopter. The graphic below illustrates the concept, comparing the Eurocopter X3 with a Sikorsky X2 helicopter.
Eurocopter's X3 helicopter
Last week, a normal flow of life for many was interrupted by the news of the second earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. In my family, we had reasons to be more worried than most: my partner’s close relatives live in Christchurch.
We hadn’t heard anything from them for several days and were extremely concerned until the following email arrived this morning:
“…To recap, the second earthquake again ripped the power and phone lines from our house and all water stopped. We had water restored on Thursday at low pressure, so no hot water. Friday our power was reconnected to the house but needed an electrician to tape wires in the house before the power went. Saturday, half way through a load of washing, the water stopped again. The gusher over the road was stopped and our water along with it!
A water collection site was set up at the nearest primary school which is very close to us. So we are able to collect and all water we need for hand washing, teeth cleaning and cooking. We have been to friends who have power and water to have a shower every second day.
Yesterday we had our phone restored. As with the power, they had to put extra length into the wires as the earthquake had moved the top of the power pole further away from our house!!”
It all made me think of all those nameless workers and engineers: electrical, communications, sanitary etc. - there may be the IET members among them too!) who are now working so hard to restore some normality to everyday life in Christchurch. We hear a lot about the heroism of rescue teams, fire brigades, volunteers etc., but not about the seemingly “mundane” efforts of our Christchurch colleagues. They deserve better recognition for their real, life-saving engineering.
If you know any of them, please write to this blog.”
http://eandt.theiet.org/blog/blogpost.cfm?threadid=40006&catid=364
Take a tour through the summer night city that is Stockholm, as Swedish software developers Propellerheads explore novel ways to draw attention to the release of the latest version of their flagship music production application, Reason 5, and its audio recording sidekick, Record 1.5.
What better way to advertise a new drum machine called Kong than to create a set of monster-sized drum control pads, take them out on to the street and play Kong for the crowds while simultaneously projecting the software drum machine interface on to the side of Stockholm’s largest buildings?
Reason 5 and Record 1.5 are both set for global release tomorrow (Wednesday).
As NIWeek 2010, the graphical systems design convention, gets under way here in Austin, Texas, there is optimism in the air. The optimism is not just for business – we are in perhaps the most confident state of the USA, after all – but for the future of engineering.
Yesterday the host company, National Instruments, not only announced the latest version of its flagship LabVIEW software, it also released some headline numbers for the convention: almost 3000 paying delegates, which is a jump of eight per cent from last year, and a 103 per cent take-up of the exhibition space – yes, the exhibition was overbooked and more stand space had to be provided.
The exhibition segment – there’s also over 250 conference sessions of varying sizes – opens formally later today, and while much of it is deeply specialist, at yesterday’s preview it was striking just how many of the exhibits are all about showing what fun engineering can be. We’re talking education and enthusing the young here.
And it’s working too – we all know how successful Lego Mindstorms and its relatives have been at popularising robotics, and there is plenty of that here, but there’s also several other examples of whacky projects which were put together just to prove a point, and which then ‘went viral’ on YouTube or elsewhere.
Popcorn Tweets, the Twitter-powered popcorn machine is here, for example, and for this week you can also pop corn by tweeting the #niweek tag. There’s a machine that sorts M&Ms by colour, a robot that uses machine vision to play a video-game guitar, and lots more.
No, not one of those compact devices designed to give one an initmate sensual tingle when an incoming call arrives on your mobile… ‘The Pleasure Telephone’ is a 45-minute long BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature documentary about the ‘Electrophone’, a patented 19th Century technology that used early the telephone network to relay entertainment to subscribers.
Opera was to have an honoured place in entertainment-by-telephone history – Covent Garden performances could be accessed live in private homes, gentlemen’s clubs and hotels. In the USA, subscribers were ‘taught’ operas by an interweaving of spoken libretto and recordings of arias. The Pleasure Telephone also looks at the breadth of entertainment offered via the telephone by companies in the UK, Hungary, France and the USA. In London, for example, the Electrophone company offered a range of West End productions to subscribers – including via coin-in-the-slot machines. There was also live worship on offer from prominent churches…
You can catch the programme on Listen Again until next Friday 21 May.
Interested in sound? Interested in music technology? Interested in bringing the two together in new and exciting ways to create hitherto unknown worlds of aural pleasure? Good news: your luck’s in.
Professor David Howard – or Professor David Howard CEng FIET, Head of the Audio Lab, Intelligent Systems, Research Group Department of Electronics, University of York to give him his full name – is giving a free lecture on Wednesday, 12 May 2010 in the South Kensington Campus, Sir Alexander Fleming Building (not the Ian Fleming Building, sadly) at the Imperial College, London, UK.
The good Prof will be looking at the ways in which sound can be created and manipulated with demonstration sounds being used to show what is happening and also at how we can control sounds in live musical performance using human gesture and various interfaces including some that take advantage of smart materials. Waving at stuff, jabbing fingers at it, that sort of thing, I wager.
Full details of the free music technology event are on the IET Events pages.
There’s also a preview video on the IET’s YouTube channel. I warn you now about the near-3D opening to the video, where Professor Howard virtually lunges out of the screen at you, but I promise that he settles down after that.
The whole thing kicks off at 6pm GMT (the only mean time that matters, my colonial friends), so if you’ve got a spare couple of hours in London on Wednesday evening, you could do worse than chillax with the good Prof at ICL.
And if you can’t make it to any of this, the whole kit and caboodle is also being webcast. Seriously, dude, no excuses.
E&T is the IET's magazine covering science, engineering and technology.
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