Machine Design Blogs

This short video shot at the experimental aircraft get-together in Oshkosh gives you an idea of what the planes in the Rocket Racing League are going to look like and how they’ll perform.

http://tinyurl.com/6hlat7

Well, jet pack is a misnomer. This is actually powered by a piston engine which drives two ducted fans. It is a little like taking the ducted fan UAV that Honeywell came up with (you can see a video of that here: http://machinedesign.com/Video/714/72766/HoneywellsHoveringUAV.aspx)

http://tinyurl.com/66dmay

If women aren’t going into technology and science career fields, it is not because they lack math apptitude. New research finds no difference between the average math scores of boys and girls in the grades 2 through 11. You can find a link to the study here, along with some interesting commentary on it at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3191/girls-as-good-as-boys-at-math-study-finds?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Who says the issue of man-made global warming has been settled? The journal Physics & Society just published a debate on the subject because, according to the editor,

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

You can see the rest of the editor’s comments here:

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/editor.cfm

One of the conclusions found in the Journal paper called “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” is particularly interesting:

In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. If the concluding equation in this analysis (Eqn. 30) is correct, the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity must have been very much exaggerated. There may, therefore, be a good reason why, contrary to the projections of the models on which the IPCC relies, temperatures have not risen for a decade and have been falling since the phase-transition in global temperature trends that occurred in late 2001.

That paper can be found here: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Another interesting tidbit from the article: In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune ’s largest moon, and Pluto all warmed at the same time as Earth.

What ever happened to just scribbling formulas on the palm of your hand? The YouTube clip is interesting and so is the discussion that follows.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3160/students-show-how-to-cheat-via-youtube?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

When researchers were devising their complicated theories about how ancient Britons built Stonehenge, apparently they forgot to consult today’s construction workers. It turns out erecting Stonehenge’s pillars may not have involved nearly as much effort or as many people as researchers have supposed. That’s the take-away from this video of a Michigan construction worker who, by himself, moves around multi-ton concrete pillars and is erecting his own version of Stonehenge to prove his point that the whole thing was well within the capabilities of a few ancients.

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks

This is all over the Web but here is a link to the story if you haven’t seen it. The chief engineer for the Camry hybrid died of a heart attack which was eventually ruled to be caused by overwork, poor guy.

For those unfamiliar with the Toyota method of product development, the chief engineer on the project is responsible for the ultimate success or failure of the effort and is under a lot of pressure. The moral of the story: stress can kill.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080709/ap_on_bi_ge/japan_overwork_death

Done as an artistic piece, this “trabantimino” extends itself via hydraulics to change from an east german trabant to an american muscle car. Of course, it carries a V8 engine — no amount of transformer action can change a 26-hp trabant engine into a small block chevy. Unfortunately, the video doesn’t really show all that much of the underlying technology.

http://mywikibiz.com/Liz_Cohen

The link below takes you to an audio/video clip showing the ATC radar screen readout and the radio exchange that happened when a private pilot minding his own business got buzzed by an F-16 pilot. The private pilot is obviously hopping mad. He claims the F-16 came within 10 feet of him and did so on purpose. The clip, from AVwebBIZ, goes on to say the F-16 pilot got reprimanded for this little stunt.

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/exclusivevids/ExclusiveVideo_F16InterceptsJetTurboprop_MOA_198263-1.html

I always thought it was a little screwy that the grade I got in a high school typing class counted as much as my grade in precalculus. Looks like I wasn’t the only one with this idea. Texas is apparently going to fold course difficulty into the calculation of high school GPAs. The move is quite controversial judging by the comments posted for this item in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/news/article/4766/recalculation-of-high-school-gpas-sows-confusion-in-texas?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en