yyzmcleod - Slashdot User

Submission + - Canada's AeroVelo breaks human-powered land speed record (design-engineering.com)

Submitted by yyzmcleod on Friday September 18, 2015 @03:48PM

yyzmcleod writes: First, they designed and flew the world’s first human-powered ornithopter called the Snowbird in 2010. Then, in 2013, they surmounted the seemingly impossible challenge of winning the Sikorsky Prize with the Atlas human-powered helicopter.

And now, as of yesterday, AeroVelo, the Ontario-based team of engineers and University of Toronto students, have helped their captain, Dr. Todd Reichert, become the fastest human-powered man alive. At the World Human Powered Speed Challenge (WHPSC), held annually along a five-mile stretch of highway in Battle Mountain, Nevada, the team’s Eta recumbent speed bike hit 85.71mph (137.93km/h) Thursday morning, besting the previous world record of 83.13 mph.

Submission + - NASA's JPL develops multi-metal 3D printing process (design-engineering.com)

Submitted by yyzmcleod on Thursday July 31, 2014 @10:50AM

yyzmcleod writes: The technology to 3D print a single part from multiple materials has been around for years, but only for polymer-based additive manufacturing processes. For metals, jobs are typically confined to a single powdered base metal or alloy per object. However, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they have developed a 3D printing technique that allows for print jobs to transition from one metal to another in a single object.

Submission + - Festo to fly BionicOpter at Hannover (canadianmanufacturing.com)

Submitted by

yyzmcleod

on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:42PM

yyzmcleod writes: "Building on the work of last year’s bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and manoeuvring in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter’s ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."

Submission + - Researchers create life-sized 3D hologram for videoconferencing (canadianmanufacturing.com)

Submitted by

yyzmcleod

on Friday May 04, 2012 @12:42PM

yyzmcleod writes: "A research team at Queen’s University has created a human-scale 3D hologram pod that allows people in different locations to videoconference as if they are standing in front of each other.

Called TeleHuman, the technology is the creation of professor Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab, and his graduate team at the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Similar to the Star Trek holodeck, participants can walk around the 3D hologram of the remote person they’re talking to and view them from all sides. More importantly, the system captures 3D visual cues that 2D video miss, such as head orientation, gaze and overall body posture."

Comment General Fusion approach? (Score 2) 318

by yyzmcleod on Thursday March 22, 2012 @12:06PM (#39441535) Attached to: Ask MIT Researchers About Fusion Power

What is your opinion of General Fusion's (www.generalfusion.com) approach to a fusion reactor design?

Submission + - Deformable Liquid Mirrors for Adaptive Optics (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn on Thursday June 17, 2010 @08:21AM

eldavojohn writes: Want to make a great concave mirror for your telescope? Put a drop of mercury in a bowl and spin the bowl. The mercury will spread out to a concave reflective surface smoother than anything we can make with plain old glass right now. The key problem in this situation is that the bowl will always have to point straight up. MIT's Technology Review is analyzing a team's success in combating problems with bringing liquid mirrors into the practical applications of astronomy. To fight the gravity requirement, the team used a ferromagnetic liquid coated with a metal-like film and very strong magnetic fields to distort the surface of that liquid as they needed. But this introduces new non-linear problems of control when trying to sync up several of these mirrors similar to how traditional glass telescopes use multiple hexagon shaped mirrors mounted on actuators. The team has fought past so many of these problems plaguing liquid mirrors that they produced a proof of concept liquid mirror just five centimeters across with ninety-one actuators cycling at one Kilohertz and the ability to linearize the response of the liquid. And with that, liquid mirrors take a giant leap closer to practicality.

Submission + - New Mac Mini's Aiming For Your Living Room? (pcworld.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass on Tuesday June 15, 2010 @09:09AM

WrongSizeGlass writes: PC World is reporting on the latest version of Apple's Mac Mini. At only 1.4-inches tall the unibody aluminium enclosure includes an HDMI port, an SD card reader, and more graphics and processing power. Even the power supply is inside now. The base model comes with 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard disk — for $699. Graphics power comes from an NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU (as found in lower-end MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops). Apple appears to be aiming for living rooms by including the HDMI port and eliminating the external power brick. Does the addition of these new features blur the line between Mac Mini and Apple TV?

Submission + - Size Matters-Engineering the 30-Meter Telescope (canadianmanufacturing.com)

Submitted by

yyzmcleod

on Tuesday May 12, 2009 @02:14PM

yyzmcleod writes: "When completed in 2018, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will be the world's largest and most powerful, with a resolving power 100 times that of Hubble. As TMT's preliminary design review nears, the following story details how its enclosure, segmented mirror and adaptive optics will work to let astronomers peer back to the beginning of the Cosmos."

Submission + - Why IT Won't Power Down PCs (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Thursday April 16, 2009 @11:53AM

snydeq writes: "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."

Slashdot Top Deals