Tag: Science & Technology

Stuck in traffic? Look upwards and pray, “O God! Please get me out of here!” Then God sends his Vahana, lifts you out of the congestion and carries you to your destination by air!

Fancy concept, right? Engineers at Airbus too thought so and designers at Italdesign then said, ‘Why not?’

Enter Pop.Up, a fully-electric concept multimodal transport system that could ferry you through roads and if needed, airlift you out of traffic congestion.

Not kidding! French aircraft major Airbus unveiled a concept of its Pop.Up at the Geneva International Motor Show on Wednesday, which the company claims “makes full use of the urban transportation space” in megacities like New York, London, Paris and Bejing. The company also has Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad on the map.

The Pop.Up consists of three modules: A carbon-fibre capsule that would carry passengers or goods, a battery vehicle running on the ground and an aerial module electrically propelled by eight rotors. It essentially looks like a futuristic electric vehicle on the ground and like a drone-car in the air.

The Pop.Up concept works like this:

• You choose your destination and book a ride using an app.
• Based on your preferences, the system gives you the best mode of transport.
• The passenger capsule becomes an electric car and picks you up.
• In case of congestion, the capsule disconnects from the car and is lifted by the aerial module, becoming a “self-piloted urban-air vehicle” that delivers you to your destination.
• As the ride is completed, all components return autonomously to their nearest charging points (like a bus terminal) and await their next ride.

Projects like Vahana, Skyways and CityAirbus are being sketched on the Pop.Up concept.

Vahana, a Sanskrit word for vehicle, is essentially a single-seat electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicle by A^3, a small innovation company of Airbus.

The makers of Vahana are actively pursuing Vahana as a self-piloted flying vehicle platform for individual passenger and cargo transport, much like in the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon show Jetsons.

While the concept may sound fancy, the practicality of such an operation remains to be seen. CityAirbus is another project operating on the concept of a flying bus, more like a public chartered flight. CityAirbus Demonstration Chief Marius Bebesel says, “While Pop.Up relies on future technologies that are not yet mature enough, such as electric propulsion and sense-and-avoid technology, the basic idea of the vehicle is feasible.”

Another brand associated with Pop.Up is Italdesign, famous for designing Lamborghinis and Alfa Romeos among other marquee cars. The company’s CEO Jörg Astalosch says on the Airbus website, “When we designed the concept, we always had in mind its accessibility to a wide public. The beauty of Pop.Up is that it could be an integral part of cities’ existing public metro or tram transport systems or integrate seamlessly into a future one. For example, the passenger capsule could easily be designed to be compatible with hyperloops.” While Hyperloop is still in its nascent stage, the Pop.Up is also expected to take 7-10 years for realisation.

Meanwhile, Airbus is also keen on subletting their facilities to Amazon and DHL to deliver items. Amazon last year bought 40 Boeing 767 jets for faster product delivery and also delivered a product via drone to the customer 13 minutes after he ordered it.

Source: HT

BOSTON (TIP): Stanford scientists have developed a new software tool which will enable energy companies to calculate the possibility of triggering manmade earthquakes from activities associated with oil and gas production.

Oil and gas operations can generate significant quantities of “produced water” – brackish water that needs to be disposed of through deep injection to protect drinking water.

Energy companies also dispose of water that flows back after hydraulic fracturing in the same way.

This process can increase pore pressure – the pressure of groundwater trapped within the tiny spaces inside rocks in the subsurface – which, in turn, increases the pressure on nearby faults, causing them to slip and release seismic energy in the form of earthquakes.

“Faults are everywhere in the Earth’s crust, so you can’t avoid them. Fortunately, the majority of them are not active and pose no hazard to the public,” said Mark Zoback, professor at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy at Environmental Sciences.

“The trick is to identify which faults are likely to be problematic, and that’s what our tool does,” said Zoback.

The newly developed Fault Slip Potential (FSP) tool uses three key pieces of information to help determine the probability of a fault being pushed to slip.

The first is how much wastewater injection will increase pore pressure at a site. The second is knowledge of the stresses acting in the earth.

This information is obtained from monitoring earthquakes or already drilled wells in the area. The final piece of information is knowledge of pre-existing faults in the area.

Such information typically comes from data collected by oil and gas companies as they explore for new resources.

Researchers have started testing their FSP tool in Oklahoma, which has experienced a sharp rise in the number of earthquakes since 2009, due largely to wastewater injection operations.

Their analysis suggests that some wastewater injection wells in Oklahoma were unwittingly placed near stressed faults already primed to slip.

“Our tool provides a quantitative probabilistic approach for identifying at-risk faults so that they can be avoided,” said Rall Walsh, graduate student at Stanford.

“Our aim is to make using this tool the first thing that is done before an injection well is drilled,” Walsh said.

LONDON (TIP): Scientists have designed a new, super-fast form of a “magic” computer made of DNA molecules that grows as it computes and can outperform all standard systems in solving practical problems.

Researchers from University of Manchester showed the feasibility of engineering a universal turing machine (UTM) -a computer that can be programmed to compute anything any other device can process.Electronic computers are a form of UTM, but no quantum UTM has yet been built.

The theoretical properties of such a computing machine, including its exponential boost in speed over electronic and quantum computers, have been understood for many years but the breakthrough demonstrates that it is possible to physically create a UTM using DNA molecules.

“Imagine a computer is searching a maze and comes to a choice point, one path leading left, the other right.Electronic computers need to choose which path to fol low first,” said researcher Ross King. “But our new computer doesn’t need to choose, for it can replicate itself and follow both paths at the same time, thus finding the answer faster.”

“This `magical’ property is possible because the computer’s processors are made of DNA rather than silicon chips.” “As DNA molecules are very small a desktop computer could potentially utilise more processors than all the electronic computers in the world combined and therefore outperform the world’s current fastest supercomputer, while consuming a tiny fraction of its energy ,” he said.

A tsunami’s immense wall of water may not be stoppable. But there may be a way to take the ferocious force of nature down a few notches, using a pair of counterwaves.

If released at the right moment, a type of sound wave known as an acoustic-gravity wave could subdue a tsunami, applied mathematician Usama Kadri of Cardiff University in Wales reports January 23 in Heliyon. These acoustic-gravity waves, which reach deep below the ocean’s surface, can stretch tens or hundreds of kilometers and easily travel long distances at high speeds.

In Kadri’s plan, two acoustic-gravity waves would be launched through the water at the earthquake-triggered ocean surge. The waves would be tuned to exchange energy with the tsunami as they speed past, spreading the tsunami out by redistributing its energy and thereby decreasing its maximum height.

The tsunami sapper is still theoretical — scientists don’t yet have a way to create the high-energy waves needed. But Kadri suggests his approach could have shrunk the amplitude of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami by almost 30 percent. Such a reduction translates to a five-meter decrease in the height the water reached above sea level, enough to potentially save lives and property.

Source: Science news

The world is on the verge of a water crisis. Rainfall shifts caused by climate change plus the escalating water demands of a growing world population threaten society’s ability to meet its mounting needs. By 2025, the United Nations predicts, 2.4 billion people will live in regions of intense water scarcity, which may force as many as 700 million people from their homes in search of water by 2030.

Those water woes have people thirstily eyeing the more than one sextillion liters of water in Earth’s oceans and some underground aquifers with high salt content. For drinking or irrigation, the salt must come out of all those liters. And while desalination has been implemented in some areas — such as Israel and drought-stricken California — for much of the world, salt-removal is a prohibitively expensive energy drain.

Scientists and engineers, however, aren’t giving up on the quest for desalination solutions. The technology underlying modern desalination has been around for decades, “but we have not driven it in such a way as to be ubiquitous,” says UCLA chemical engineer Yoram Cohen. “That’s what we need to figure out: how to make desalination better, cheaper and more accessible.”

Recent innovations could bring costs down and make the technology more accessible. A new wonder material may make desalination plants more efficient. Solar-powered disks could also serve up freshwater with no need for electricity. Once freshwater is on tap, coastal floating farms could supply food to Earth’s most parched places, one scientist proposes.

Watering holes

Taking the salt out of water is hardly a new idea. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle noted that Greek sailors would evaporate impure water, leaving the salt behind, and then condense the vapor to make drinkable water. In the 1800s, the advent of steam-powered travel and the subsequent need for water without corrosive salt for boilers prompted the first desalination patent, in England.

Most modern desalination plants use a technique that differs from these earlier efforts. Instead of evaporating water, pumps force pressurized saltwater from the ocean or salty underground aquifers through special sheets. These membranes contain molecule-sized holes that act like club bouncers, allowing water to pass through while blocking salt and other contaminants.

The membranes are rolled like rugs and stuffed into meter-long tubes with additional layers that direct water flow and provide structural support. A large desalination plant uses tens of thousands of membranes that fill a warehouse. This process is known as reverse osmosis and the result is salt-free water plus a salty brine waste product that is typically pumped underground or diluted with seawater and released back into the ocean. It takes about 2.5 liters of seawater to make 1 liter of freshwater.

LONDON: Scientists have identified materials that can withstand temperatures of nearly 4,000 degrees Celsius, an advance that may pave the way for improved heat resistant shielding for the faster-than-ever hypersonic space vehicles.

Researchers from Imperial College London in the UK discovered that the melting point of hafnium carbide is the highest ever recorded for a material.

Tantalum carbide (TaC) and hafnium carbide (HfC) are refractory ceramics, meaning they are extraordinarily resistant to heat. Their ability to withstand extremely harsh environments means that refractory ceramics could be used in thermal protection systems on high-speed vehicles and as fuel cladding in the super-heated environments of nuclear reactors.

However, there has not been the technology available to test the melting point of TaC and HfC in the lab to determine how truly extreme an environment they could function in. The researchers developed a new extreme heating technique using lasers to test the heat tolerance of TaC and HfC.