The 123,000 MPH Plasma Engine That Could Finally Take Astronauts To Mars |... You might expect to find our brightest hope for sending astronauts to other planets in Houston, at NASA's Johnson Space Center, inside a high-security multibillion-dollar facility. But it's actually a few miles down the street, in a large warehouse behind a strip mall. This bland and uninviting building is the private aerospace start-up Ad Astra Rocket Company, and inside, founder Franklin Chang Díaz is building a rocket engine that's faster and more powerful than anything NASA has ever flown before.
Speed, Chang Díaz believes, is the key to getting to Mars alive. In fact, he tells me as we peer into a three-story test chamber, his engine will one day travel not just to the Red Planet, but to Jupiter and beyond. I look skeptical, and Chang Díaz smiles politely. Chang Díaz has spent nearly his entire career laboring to convince anyone who would listen that his idea will work, but that career has also taken several turns in the process. Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon... Video from the paper "Bouncing Water Droplet on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array," authored by Adrianus I.
Aria, Morteza Gharib, published online on ArXiv, Submitted on 7 Oct 2010: The first two parts of the video show the impact dynamic of 30 microliters water droplet at different impact velocity. At low impact velocity of 1.03 m/s, the water droplet deforms upon impact and eventually bounces off completely of the surface of the array. At higher impact velocity of 2.21 m/s, the droplet breaks up into many smaller droplets and eventually bounces off completely of the surface of the array. The coefficient of restitution of water droplet at very low impact velocity can be seen clearly by dropping a water droplet on a slightly tilted carbon nanotube array. All parts of the video were captured by high speed camera operated at various frame rates. This work was supported by The Charyk Foundation and The Fletcher Jones Foundation. "Wind Lens" Turbines Could Boost Energy Generation 3X | Inhabitat...
Forget about traditional tri-blade wind turbines — the ultra-efficient turbine of the future might look completely different if Kyushu University professor Yuji Ohya has anything to say about it. Ohya and his team recently unveiled the Wind Lens, a honeycomb-like structure that purportedly triples the amount of wind energy that can be produced by offshore turbines. The Wind Lens was unveiled at this month’s Yokohama Renewable Energy International Exhibition 2010. The structure works similarly to a magnifying glass that intensifies light from the sun — except in this case, the lens intensifies wind flow. Ohya’s design doesn’t have too many moving parts — just a hoop (AKA a brimmed diffuser) that “magnifies” wind power, and a turbine that is rotated by wind captured from the hoop. Each Lens, which measures 112 meters in diameter, can provide enough energy for an average household. + Wind Lens Turbine Via CNNGo. Berkeley Bionics — eLEGS, the personal exoskeleton.