China's '3D Fast Bus' Straddles the Road So Cars Can Drive Under. Photos: Chinanews Too Expensive to Go Under? Go Over... What if there was a way to get most of the benefits of a subway, but without the costs of digging up all those tunnels? The Chinese company Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. thinks it might be able to do just that with a concept it calls the 3D Fast Bus (which has also been called the straddling bus), and kind of giant bus/train that straddles the street and allows cars to drive right under it. This means that it isn't slowed down by traffic and it doesn't add to traffic either. Read on for more details and a video showing a rendering of the 3D Fast Bus in action. The presenter in this video is Song Youzhou, chairman of Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co., the company that is proposing the 3D Fast Bus. What you can see from the video is traffic jams, what you can hear is noise, and there is also invisible air pollution.
Compromise Between BRT and Subway It's certainly a very interesting idea. Via Chinahush, Engadget. MIT Designs Ultra-Efficient, Flying Fishlike Planes. The next major replacements for the Boeing 737 and 777 models might not come from Boeing at all. MIT researchers recently presented NASA with two models for efficient, low emissions planes--part of a $2.1 million research contract awarded to the university by NASA in 2008. MIT's objective: design quiet subsonic planes that emit 70% less NOx, burn 70% less fuel than current models, and have the ability to take off from short runways. In true MIT style, the university delivered--albeit with designs that completely reimagine the traditional aircraft silhouette. Two models emerged from MIT's research--The 180-passenger D "double bubble" series, intended to replace the Boeing 737, and the 350 passenger H "hybrid wing body" series, a replacement for the Boeing 777. MIT elaborates on the flying fish-like D series design: The engineers conceived of the D series by reconfiguring the tube-and-wing structure.
The D series and H series models aren't MIT's first attempts at aircraft design. Simple mechanisms explained. Email Below you’ll find animated diagrams and explanations of how various mechanisms work. Some of these have been crucial to major evolutions in mechanisms and technology, and allow us to do anything from fire weaponry to make cars move with the press of a pedal.
Maltese Cross mechanism powers second hand movement in the clock: Radial engines are used in aircraft. Today, however, most aircraft use turbine engines: Reciprocating movements power steam engines in locomotives: Sewing machine: Manual transmission mechanism, also known as “stick shift” is used to change gears in vehicles: This mechanism is called constant-velocity joint and is used in front-wheel drive vehicles: Torpedo-boat destroyer system is used to destroy fleet in naval military operations: The Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine which uses a rotary design to convert pressure into a rotating motion instead of using reciprocating pistons: + Bonus – mechanism you can watch forever Leave your comment:
The brick-road-laying Tiger Stone. Laying down paving bricks is back-breaking, time-consuming work... or at least, it is if you do it the usual way. Henk van Kuijk, director of Dutch industrial company Vanku, evidently decided that squatting/kneeling and shoving the bricks into place on the ground was just a little too slow, so he invented the Tiger Stone paving machine. The road-wide device is fed loose bricks, and lays them out onto the road as it slowly moves along. A quick going-over with a tamper, and you’ve got an instant brick road. View all One to three human operators stand on the platform of the Tiger Stone, and move loose bricks by hand from its hopper to its sloping “pusher” slot – the bricks do have to be fed into the pusher in the desired finished pattern. From there, gravity causes them to slide together, in one road-wide sheet, down onto the sand. The tread-tracked machine is electrically-powered, and has few moving parts, so noise and maintenance are kept to a minimum.
Via Gizmodo. About the Author.