This is it. Harley-Davidson has been teasing us with the prospect of their own in-house electric bicycles for over two years. And today the bar-and-shield motorcycle manufacturer has finally announced its new dedicated electric bicycle brand known as Serial 1 Cycle Company.

The brand’s name is an homage to the very first motorcycle ever built by Harley-Davidson in 1903, named “Serial Number One.”

Back then, motorcycles were essentially just bicycles with a small engine placed in front of the pedals.

Circa 2019

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NASA’s X-Plane Program has been around for 70 years. Over the course of those decades, the agency has developed a series of airplanes and rockets to test out various technologies and design advances. Now NASA has cleared the newest one, the X-59, for final assembly.

The X-59 is a supersonic aircraft design. Its full name is the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft. Rather than pushing for greater speeds or higher altitudes like some previous X-Plane’s, the X-59 is designed to break the sound barrier without the sonic boom. The X-59 will produce no more than a loud thump, if anything at all, when it passes the sound barrier.

Preliminary design for the X-59 began in February 2016. NASA wanted to develop a supersonic aircraft that eliminated the sonic boom. Supersonic aircraft have been around for a while, and have served as commercial airline aircraft. The Concorde was in service until 2003, but the tell-tale sonic boom that the Concorde created is problematic: the Concorde was only allowed on ocean-crossing flights as the noise was too much for populated areas.

The experimental aircraft has completed 31 flights so far.

This craft uses laminar flow 😃

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Aviation startup Boom Supersonic has unveiled a fully assembled version of its demonstrator aircraft, taking an important step forward in its efforts to build the world’s fastest airliner. The company’s XB-1 is a sleek, one-third-scale prototype of its Overture passenger plane, and is designed to break the sound barrier itself with test flights due to kick off next year.

Boom Supersonic is one of a number of aviation companies working to make supersonic air travel a part of the civilian transport mix, with Virgin Galactic, Aerion and Spike Aerospace all sharing similar visions. The startup only emerged in 2016, with the lofty ambition of one day flying passengers from London to New York in 3.6 hours on a US$5,000 return ticket.

A key part of its roadmap is the XB-1 prototype, which was also announced in 2016 with claims that it could fly 10 percent faster than the Concorde with a cruising speed of Mach 2.2 (1,675 mph, 2,700 km/h). Boom Supersonic had originally targeted 2017 for the first subsonic flights of the XB-1, so it is a little behind schedule, but today showed off the fully-assembled demonstrator for the first time.

Austrian company Cyclotech is planning to begin flight-testing an 80-kg (176-lb) demonstrator of its unique electric VTOL airframe, which uses Voith-Schneider propellers instead of rotors for exceptional agility and control in the air.

The prop design, which looks a bit like it belongs on the back of an 1850s paddle steamer, was patented nearly 100 years ago but hasn’t made it into a production aircraft yet. Each prop is a spinning cylinder whose walls are formed by a number of wing blades.

The secret to the agility of this “Cyclogyro” arrangement is analogous to the way helicopter blades work, continuously altering the angle of the blades as they spin to adjust and direct lift using a “swashplate.” In the Cyclogyro arrangement, a mechanical linkage – conrods connected to a central hub – is able to tilt and angle the wing blades as they spin around the cylinder, tilting them gradually into the wind as they reach a certain point in their rotation, and then gradually back to flat as they pass the peak point.