New material improving stealth mode vehicles and planes.
When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It’s so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the nanotubes were actually grown on crumpled foil (seriously — watch the video below the fold). Well, the new version of Vantablack is darker than that. In fact, Surrey can’t even give us the percentage of light that gets absorbed, because its spectrometers can’t measure it.
In this video below (and the GIF above), you can see the material engulf the laser pointer in darkness when it moves across:
Audi RSQ – a fantastic car. Certainly a design icon, but first of all, a movie star. The Audi RSQ was the first car we developed for a motion picture – with great success. This sporty coupé for the 2004 Hollywood science-fiction “I, Robot” was a visionary concept of what a car might look like in 2035. Four designers, ten model engineers, ten weeks, all creative liberties – that’s what it took to create this Audi of the future.
What was really unique and visionary about the Audi RSQ: It was the first Audi demonstrating piloted driving capabilities. Here is one of my favorite moments in the movie – a moment that tells you a lot about piloted driving:
The Audi RSQ is going autonomously in a busy, but fluent traffic situation. Suddenly, the car comes under heavy attack by enemy robots. Actor Will Smith in his role of a police officer decides to take over. Like all heroes, he wants to manage and control critical situations by himself. But his lady co-driver does not trust him and says: “Oh no, don’t do it! It is too dangerous to control the car by yourself!” And she is right, he is damaging the car a few minutes later.
This dialogue is a great lesson in future technology:
What was science-fiction in 2004, became reality only ten years later. Today, we connect driver, car and environment in an intuitive way. Today, our cars are ready for piloted driving and piloted parking. Piloted driving is a great example of how we turn technical vision into emotional premium products that fascinate customers around the globe.
As an innovation driver for the automotive industry, we count on a proven formula of success: Pioneering solutions + precision engineering + partnering with the best. We partner with the leaders in automotive and consumer electronics, in battery systems, in research and education.
Goodyear has taken the wraps off two concept tires designed for the autonomous cars of tomorrow – including a spherical tire that allow cars to drive sideways and one that can sense road conditions and adapt to them.
The Goodyear Eagle-360 is our vision for a tire for the long-term future that looks radically different from tires today…it’s a sphere! The unique shape means ultimate manoeuvrability, safety and connectivity for autonomous vehicles.
Could this Quantum Technology inertial sensors be utilized to provide more reliable navigation to driverless autos? Quantum again proves to serve multiple usages.
Advances in laser cooling of atoms have produced a new generation of inertial sensors based on matter-wave interferometers, which are becoming an essential technology for accurate positioning or geodesy.
Driverless cars, like the one Google launched in 2012, are touted for their potential energy savings, but engineers say we should consider the possibility that the technology will intensify car use.
If people can work, relax, and even hold meetings in their cars, they may drive more.
Sydney has been having a big problem with oversized trucks driving into tunnels that are too low. So Sydney needed a stop sign that is absolutely impossible to miss. Here it is and it’s amazing.
It’s a curtain of water with a stop sign projected onto it. You can have as many overhead stop signs as you want, but as this 10 News video report shows, truck drivers still crash their trucks into these low-overhead tunnels. Sydney was tired of the delays, the costs of the damages, and the threat that a truck crash would get someone killed.
That’s why in 2007 they put in this water curtain sign on its harbor tunnel, designed by light show company Laservision. They work brilliantly.
NASA has commissioned engineers to design a new kind of jet that can travel faster than the speed of sound, but without the telltale sonic boom. Instead, the aircraft will produce a soft thump as it breaks the sound barrier, which the researchers are adorably calling a “supersonic heartbeat”.
It’s hoped that the new jet could eventually fill the commercial gap left by the retirement of the Concorde — which travelled at twice the speed of sound (Mach 2) and could get passengers from London to New York in just 3.5 hours — but without all the noise complaints.
From an engineering point of view, we’ve long had the ability to travel at supersonic speeds — which is generally anything over 1,234 km/h — but when we do, it triggers a sound explosion that can travel thousands of metres in a jet’s wake, rattling houses and cars as it goes. As you can imagine, not exactly ideal for heavily trafficked flight paths.
