Ford Motor Company, ones of America’s oldest companies, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in many ways from the supply chain to production to used car sales to self-driving vehicles. The company prioritizes technology, and this focus is one reason it’s leading the path to the future.
A flying taxi that you can order through an app? This German company plans to make that a reality in the next six years.
Munich-based startup Lilium unveiled its five-seater electric air taxi prototype on Thursday. The Lilium Jet, which conducted its first flight earlier this month, is part of an app-based flying taxi service that the company expects will be “fully-operational in various cities around the world by 2025.”
The battery-powered jet is capable of traveling 300 kilometers (186 miles) in 60 minutes on a single charge, and will connect cities through a network of landing pads. Commuters will be able to book rides from their nearest landing pad through a smartphone app.
Fiber optic gyroscopes, which measure the rotation and orientation of airplanes and other moving objects, are inherently limited in their precision when using ordinary classical light. In a new study, physicists have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that using entangled photons overcomes this classical limit, called the shot-noise limit, and achieves a level of precision that would not be possible with classical light.
The physicists, led by Matthias Fink and Rupert Ursin at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, have published a paper on the entanglement-enhanced fiber-optic gyroscope in a recent issue of the New Journal of Physics.
“We have demonstrated that the generation of entangled photons has reached a level of technical maturity that enables us to perform measurements with sub-shot noise accuracy in harsh environments,” Fink told Phys.org.
Circa 2018
Lockheed Martin has won a nearly quarter-billion dollar NASA contract to develop a plane capable of supersonic speed without creating the deafening sonic boom that comes with breaking the sound barrier.
The cost-plus NASA contract, valued at $247.5 million, will allow the defense contractor’s secretive Skunk Works division to continue development of Lockheed Martin’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (or QueSST) aircraft. This is “NASA’s first X-plane in a generation,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday.
“We look forward to applying the extensive work completed under QueSST to the design, build and flight test of the X-plane, providing NASA with a demonstrator to make supersonic commercial travel possible for passengers around the globe,” program manager Peter Iosifidis said in a statement.
An all-Princeton research team has identified bacteria that can detect the speed of flowing fluids.
Many kinds of cells can sense flow, just as our skin cells can feel the difference between a gentle breeze and a strong wind. But we depend on feeling the force involved, the push-back from the air against us. Without that push, we can’t distinguish speed; when the windows are closed, our skin can’t feel any difference in air force whether we are sitting in an office, a speeding car or a cruising airplane. But now, a team of Princeton researchers has now discovered that some bacteria can in fact detect the speed of flow regardless of the force. Their paper appears in the online journal Nature Microbiology.
“We have engineered bacteria to be speedometers,” said Zemer Gitai, Princeton’s Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology and the senior author on the paper. “There’s an application here: We can actually use these bacteria as flow sensors. If you wanted to know the speed of something in real time, we can tell you.”
To clean up the aviation industry, NASA-funded scientists are working to develop an all-electric aircraft powered by cryogenically-liquified hydrogen fuel.
The University of Illinois scientists behind the project nailed down $6 million over three years from NASA to develop the tech, according to a university-published press release — tech that could, if the project pans out, revolutionize the aviation industry.
It may not be the Millennium Falcon, but United Airlines plans to a debut a plane with a Star Wars look this fall.
During Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, United Airlines announced it will introduce special Star Wars-themed airplane to its fleet to promote the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the latest Star Wars movie.
The Star Wars livery will be on one of United’s Boeing 737–800 planes, according to the company. Along with the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker logo, other artwork on the plane includes imagery of Star Wars vehicles such as a TIE fighter and an X-Wing.
