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The March Of Technology

Elon Musk does his best to give us the future we fantasized about in the childhood.

Elon Musk Claims That SpaceX Mars Rocket Can Fly Passengers Around the World in an Hour

By Omar Sohail
10 hours ago
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Does a 16-hour flight sound like an excruciating experience for you? Elon Musk has found a solution in the craziest idea possible, claiming at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) that the SpaceX Mars rocket can also be used to carry around passengers around the world. Best of all, the entire distance traveled will come to an hour.

Concept Video Shows How Passengers Will Be Boarding a Ferry That Takes Them to the Floating Platform in New York for Hyper-Speed Travel
The rockets are referred to as BFRs, with the first stage of traveling through these rockets involving them flying down for landing and reuse, similar to what the Falcon 9 booster does now.

RELATEDIs the Tesla Short Play About to Come Good?
According to the video, it would take around 30 minutes for passengers to travel from New York to Shanghai, a trip which currently takes around 15 hours to complete, assuming that there are no layovers taking place. So how are these rockets able to reach from one point to the other in quick succession?

A speed of 18,000 miles per hour (or 27,000 kilometers an hour) that’s how; Musk says that you would be able to travel anywhere irrespective of how far the location is in an hour. Unfortunately, it is also the cost per trip that you will have to take into consideration because you’re probably wondering that these trips could cost a a few thousand dollars right?

Musk does not believe so and states that SpaceX is quite confident in its cost-saving measures. The billionaire entrepreneur clarified these costs that a ticket on the BFR would cost the same as an economy airline seat.


More at: http://wccftech.com/elon-musk-claim...n-fly-passengers-around-the-world-in-an-hour/
 
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have got further along this track than any other private enterprise before them.
I just hope they don't run out of money in the process.

Edit: Oh yeah...I think Tesla may go out of business. Electric battery-powered cars is a 'blind alley' technology, and they can't make it cheap enough for us all to be owners.
Hyperloop is not going to happen. Musk should drop that expensive project.
 
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Edit: Oh yeah...I think Tesla may go out of business. Electric battery-powered cars is a 'blind alley' technology, and they can't make it cheap enough for us all to be owners.
^this^

Unless battery capacity jumps by a factor of ten for the same cost, it's not going to happen. Fuel cells might be better.
 
^this^

Unless battery capacity jumps by a factor of ten for the same cost, it's not going to happen. Fuel cells might be better.
^that^
 
Glad to see a success story for British engineering. The guys down at REL have been plugging away at this quietly for some time now and it looks like a significant milestone has been reached. I just hope that it leads to great things and isn't a technology that gets 'stolen' from them either by government interference or foreign business activity!

UK's Sabre space plane engine tech in new milestone
UK engineers developing a novel propulsion system say their technology has passed another key milestone.
The Sabre air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours.
To work, it needs to manage very high temperature airflows, and the team at Reaction Engines Ltd has developed a heat-exchanger for the purpose.
This key element has just demonstrated an impressive level of performance.
It has shown the ability to handle the simulated conditions of flying at more than three times the speed of sound.
It did this by successfully quenching a 420C stream of gases in less than 1/20th of a second.
(full story at link)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47832920
 
This New Device Can Make Renewable Energy from the Cold Night Sky
By Elizabeth Howell a day ago Tech

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No sun? No problem.
A new thermoelectric device can generate electricity for an LED light bulb even during the blackest night, according to a report by researchers.
The secret is using a phenomenon known as radiative cooling, which happens when surfaces on the ground radiate heat into the atmosphere. This process can make a surface cooler than the air surrounding it, which explains why frost forms on grass even if the air temperature is above freezing.
Researchers say their device is a useful form of renewable energy, especially because lighting demand peaks at night. "Beyond lighting, we believe this could be a broadly enabling approach to power generation suitable for remote locations, and anywhere where power generation at night is needed," lead author Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement.

This New Device Can Make Renewable Energy from the Cold Night Sky
 
..especially because lighting demand peaks at night. ..

Now you see the benefit of a proper education.
 
Hydrogen Powered Drones

Seems to depend on a claimed stable & solid form of hydrogen which doesn't need a high pressure container.

H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely.

Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tyre.

But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression.

"The pressure involved is similar to what you'd get in a coffee machine," she says.

widespread availability of renewable energy and improvements in electrolysis - the chemical process of separating elements using electricity - have brought down the financial and environmental cost of producing hydrogen for fuel.

Dr Abo-Hamed points out, even if their drone fell out of the sky, the hydrogen would remain stable in its solid form inside the reactor.

Hydrogen generates three times as much power per kilogram compared to fossil fuels - approximately 39.0 Kilowatt hours per kilogram compared with roughly 13 KWh per kg for kerosene or petrol or just 0.2 KhW for conventional lithium ion batteries.

That means a hydrogen-powered drone can fly further than a battery-powered drone and, potentially, carry heavier loads.
 
Hydrogen Powered Drones

Seems to depend on a claimed stable & solid form of hydrogen which doesn't need a high pressure container.
There were experiments with encapsulation tech years ago, but that all went quiet. I'm guessing she picked up some of that old research and solved a few problems. Fantastic, if true - because hydrogen tech is definitely the way forward.
 
Electric Aquaplaning Waterbike

Can reach speed of 12 mph. Going on sale this year at close to 6 grand.

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Electric Aquaplaning Waterbike

Can reach speed of 12 mph. Going on sale this year at close to 6 grand.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Rich man's toy. Can become more available when Chinese manufacturers copy the design, which they will.
 
Here's something that feels like the future. Scientists in Switzerland have created a device, which can keep a liver alive outside a human body for a week.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0374-x

It appears the liver can even regenerate and get healthier in the device. So perhaps you can take a part of someones liver, let it grow to full size and healthier and then use that to replace the original liver.
 
Here's something that feels like the future. Scientists in Switzerland have created a device, which can keep a liver alive outside a human body for a week.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0374-x

It appears the liver can even regenerate and get healthier in the device. So perhaps you can take a part of someones liver, let it grow to full size and healthier and then use that to replace the original liver.
That is a major step forward! Wow.
 
FT 309 mentioned these:

From two years ago, did anyone get a pair? I'm not sure of the point, don't you need your slippers in the last place you left them, like by your bed and not across the room? Or in a different room? And won't the wheels make you fall over, making, well, slipping in your slippers a problem?
 
Scientists find out why leaves on the track causes travel chaos

When leaves are crushed against the tracks, they form a black layer that drastically reduces friction between train wheels and the rails – a situation Network Rail has described as “the black ice of the railway”. But the make up of this slippery layer has been something of a puzzle.

The team say the study suggests leaf tannins grab onto iron that has been dissolved from the rails by acids in the foliage, forming a layer of black material that reduces friction between steel surfaces.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Watson and colleagues report how they made their findings by infusing water with sycamore leaves to produce an acidic brown extract.

When a drop of iron chloride in water – representing iron dissolved from the rails – was added to this leaf extract, a black iron-containing material formed. This was not the case when a tannin-free leaf extract was used.

The researchers then placed their tannin-containing leaf extract between pairs of steel surfaces, finding the black material that formed significantly reduced the friction between them – compared with situations where only water or tannin-free leaf extract were applied.

“The leaf extract by itself can cause this extremely low friction,” said Watson.

The team did not compare their black material to material recovered from rail tracks, and cannot rule out other factors contributing to the slippery conditions.

“Hopefully this will lead to some chemical treatments that can stop [the slippery material] from forming,” he told the Guardian.
 
I don't see a technical reason why it can't be done, it's a bit similar to those projected keyboards.
Getting a decent resolution and power source would probably be the main obstacles.
 
I don't see a technical reason why it can't be done, it's a bit similar to those projected keyboards.
Getting a decent resolution and power source would probably be the main obstacles.
The angle of projection is pretty shallow, which could lead to some blurriness at the far end. Even a short-throw projector needs to stand further away from the surface than that.
The brightness of the laser would need to be such that it might cause heating of the skin (ouch).
The power required would be too much for the size of the unit.
Unless the wearer has dead flat skin, it would be difficult to reliably implement light-based sensors for finger-swiping, etc. It's difficult enough to do that on a digital whiteboard.
 
It might work better if instead of a wrist based item it was a projector fitted on some kind of chest mounted device, like a badge/brooch.
A sensor could detect whereabouts your hand or forearm is and project the image onto it accordingly.
And it would have a better resolution, and be more sensitive to the movements of the input device (your hand).
 
It might work better if instead of a wrist based item it was a projector fitted on some kind of chest mounted device, like a badge/brooch.
A sensor could detect whereabouts your hand or forearm is and project the image onto it accordingly.
And it would have a better resolution, and be more sensitive to the movements of the input device (your hand).
That might work, yes.
Another system might be based on the new flexible LEDs that are now available. Perhaps a thin LCD could be worn as a bracelet and have a built-in touchscreen capability. It could be used instead of a mobile phone.
 
Or we could all just continue using the tech that works just fine. Smartphones.
 
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A reason that skin tech might not catch on - it looks awful on you.
 
Thing is, smartphone screens are now available 'flexible', so surely the people that make these things could make one in which the screen bit is a separate piece that you just bung on your forearm? And the gubbins that makes it work is in your pocket.
 
The angle of projection is pretty shallow, which could lead to some blurriness at the far end. Even a short-throw projector needs to stand further away from the surface than that.

The image keystoning would be extreme, and some folks' forearms might not provide a reasonable projection surface anyway.

The brightness of the laser would need to be such that it might cause heating of the skin (ouch).
The power required would be too much for the size of the unit.
Unless the wearer has dead flat skin, it would be difficult to reliably implement light-based sensors for finger-swiping, etc. It's difficult enough to do that on a digital whiteboard.

Agreed on all points ...

The French design group Cicret promoted the concept at least as early as 2014 and called for a crowdsourcing campaign to underwrite development of the concept.

https://www.newsweek.com/bracelet-project-your-phone-screen-your-arm-291040

However ... Although they raised the amount of funding requested in 2014, the company apparently gave up after producing a prototype that didn't reflect the capabilities of the concept they'd envisioned and promoted. More info and videos of both the first working prototype and a debunking can be found at:

https://canyouactually.com/this-inc...-future-of-technology-has-officially-arrived/
 
I found undated references to a similar wristband concept that projects the image forward (onto the palm of the hand) rather than rearward (onto the forearm).

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I haven't been able to locate any information at all about this version of the wristband projector concept, so I suspect it was even more vaporous vaporware than the Cicret concept.
 
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