Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

[indiatester]

Forgot to write up about "Back to the Future" day.

Never saw that movie. Is it good?

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

The Surprising Effect That Space Radiation Had On Mouse Brains | Gizmodo Australia

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

Far in Space, a Glance at How Earth May End - WSJ

Asteroid Named ‘Spooky’ Will Buzz Earth on Halloween

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

Weird Pig-Nosed Turtle from Dinosaur Era Found in Utah : Discovery News


"It's one of the weirdest turtles that ever lived."

That was the assessment of University of Texas at Austin doctoral student Joshua Lively, in a statement about a strange new species of turtle that had a pig-like nose and lived 76 million years ago.

Lost Years Of Sea Turtles Uncovered: Photos


A fossil of the strange animal was first discovered in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by scientists from the state's natural history museum. The bones, under study by Lively during master's work at the University of Utah, suggest a two-foot-long creature with a feature never before seen in a turtle: two bony nasal openings.

Every other known turtle has just one nasal opening in its skull, the discrete nostrils created by a fleshy division.

The turtle -- dubbed Arvinachelys goldeni -- lived during the Cretaceous, among tyrannosaurs, armored ankylosaurs, and other dinosaurs in a southern "Utah" that would more closely have resembled the wet, hot landscape of bayous and rivers of present-day Louisiana.

World's Top Heavyweight Reptiles: Photos


As studies continue, the new fossil should help fill gaps in our understanding of turtle evolution, scientists say. Typically, turtle fossils don't offer much more than a skull or a shell. But the pig-nosed turtle remains have those plus an almost complete forelimb, partial hind limbs, and vertebrae from the neck.

"With only isolated skulls or shells, we are unable to fully understand how different species of fossil turtles are related, and what roles they played in their ecosystems," said Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the museum and associate professor at the University of Utah.

Lively has just described the new species in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

NASA releases space-eye view of Hurricane Patricia from the ISS | The Verge

NASA has released video footage of Hurricane Patricia taken from the International Space Station, showing just how far the behemoth storm spreads throughout the Pacific. The video was taken today at 12:15PM ET, after the storm had been upgraded to a powerful Category 5 hurricane. Patricia is so massive that the storm seems to take up the entire frame of each shot, completely obscuring the Earth underneath and turning its surface into one big white swirl. It's hard to see exactly where the storm ends.



Right now, the southwestern coast of Mexico is bracing itself for Hurricane Patricia, which is considered to be the most powerful hurricane ever recorded. The storm's wind speeds have reached up to 200 miles per hour, and it has a record low pressure of 880 millibars. The National Hurricane Center says that it will make "potentially catastrophic" landfall with Mexico this afternoon.

 

[indiatester]

NASA releases space-eye view of Hurricane Patricia from the ISS | The Verge

NASA has released video footage of Hurricane Patricia taken from the International Space Station, showing just how far the behemoth storm spreads throughout the Pacific. The video was taken today at 12:15PM ET, after the storm had been upgraded to a powerful Category 5 hurricane. Patricia is so massive that the storm seems to take up the entire frame of each shot, completely obscuring the Earth underneath and turning its surface into one big white swirl. It's hard to see exactly where the storm ends.



Right now, the southwestern coast of Mexico is bracing itself for Hurricane Patricia, which is considered to be the most powerful hurricane ever recorded. The storm's wind speeds have reached up to 200 miles per hour, and it has a record low pressure of 880 millibars. The National Hurricane Center says that it will make "potentially catastrophic" landfall with Mexico this afternoon.

It made windfall. Thankfully people have evacuated from the path.

 

[Carach Angren]

SvenSvensonov

Hey little bro! Where the helvede are you? @Transhumanist convinced me to join, I know where she is, but where'd you go!?!?

MIT Is Growing Living Bacteria Into a Second Skin That Reacts To Your Sweat

What if we could grow electronics in a lab, using carefully engineered bacteria rather than wires, plastic, and lithium? At MIT, computer interaction researchers are doing just that.

The director of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, describesit as a “paradigm shift from building to growing.” The group has named this idea Radical Atoms, a vision of the future where materials themselves are interactive, a.k.a. “material user interfaces,” or MUI. In this future, phone screens are the clunky, crude interface of the past. In their place, digital information has colonized the very fabric of our world, from our belongings to our homes.

Today, the lab unveiled a MUI called BioLogic, a project led by PhD studentLining Yao, whose work focuses on engineering materials that act like interfaces (“Rather than computing the virtual data, she is trying to compute the physical material,” her bio explains). Lining worked with New Balance and as well as the Royal College of Art in London, tapping chemical engineers and fabrication experts from MIT’s own ranks as well.

What could bring sneaker designers, chemical engineers, fashion designers, and a human-computer interaction experts together? BioLogic is a skin-like film that ventilates via fins that are raised and lowered like tiny windows on your body, opening up when your body temperature or sweat volume reaches a crucial threshold.

“We are imagining a world where actuators and sensors can be grown rather than manufactured, being derived from nature as opposed to engineered in factories,” Yao writes about the project. Biologic is a wearable technology that grows in a dish, rather than a factory.

Smart Skin For Your Dumb, Smelly Workout Clothes
For the most part, the clothing we wear to workout is dumb. You sweat in it, some of that sweat evaporates, and after a few months (or weeks, depending on how stinky you are), bacteria makes it unusable. The cycle begins anew.

But it’s bacteria that make BioLogic work—an ancient one, called Bacillus Subtilis natto, which has its roots in pre-modern Japan. Natto bacteria live in rice stalks, and it was discovered that wrapping soybeans with the husks turned the beans into a delicious fermented treat. Today, that treat is known as natto, or fermented soybeans.

So Bacillus Subtilis natto has a long history, but Yao discovered something new about it. Over email, she explained to Gizmodo how while testing a dozen different types of cells, they realized natto did something unique: The bacteria grew and contracted based on how much moisture it was exposed to. To Yao and her team, this kind of behavior was fascinating; if natto’s expansion and contraction could be carefully calibrated, perhaps it could act more like a machine than an unpredictable organism. Perhaps it could act more like an actuator.

Natto cells expanding and contracting based on humidity.

Actuators, being motors, are everywhere—in our phones, our watches, and our cars. They’re the basis for much of the modern world, turning a broad range of energy into a movement. In the Apple Watch, for example, the battery powers a linear actuator to create the vibrations you feel on your wrist.

By definition, they’re mechanical, but Yao and her collaborators want to expand that definition and engineer actuators out of biological matter like bacteria. “A cell is typically considered a factory for producing chemicals,” says Wen Wang, the MIT scientists who oversaw the biotechnology and material science of the project, in a process video. “But its own mechanical properties is always neglected.”

These tiny biological actuators require no electronics. They’re silent. They grow exponentially overnight. They’re even edible.

Living Things That Act Like Machines
But the process of turning those living actuators into a prototype is still complicated. The natto cells were grown in bioreactors at MIT, and their growth was carefully tracked using Atomic Force microscopes and other novel tools.

Natto cells in the lab.

The team grew billions of the cells, cultivating them for use in a micron-resolution printer. The finished films are actually a composite of cells, sandwiched by Kapton and plastic.

The bioprinter.

But getting the films to act the way the team hoped wasn’t as simple as simply printing them into different shapes. They actually had to develop a software to simulate the reaction of natto cells using common 3D modeling tools like Rhino and Grasshopper, helping them to speed along the process of testing different printed designs.

They developed dozens of tests of different behaviors using different patterns and shapes of cells, ranging from folding and bending to raising a texture on a cloth.

These “fresh” printed film composites were then given to designers at the Royal College of Art, who integrated them into clothing using heat maps of where the human body sweats the most and gets the hottest during exertion. The design students there created a series of garments for dancers using fin-shaped pieces of the film that raise and lower to create airflow through the clothing.

Film panels laid out on a shirt based on anatomical maps of heat and sweating

Workout clothing is only a tiny example of what BioLogic could be used for. The team has already used it for a range of other purposes, from lampshades that adjust their shading to teabags that signal when they’re ready. It’s easy to imagine bigger industrial and architectural usages, too. Right now, Yao says the film is being tested by athletes who are hooked up to sensors to test whether the design works to cool them more efficiently.

It won’t be hitting stores for a while, though. Yao explains this is partially because of the expense, and partially because of the regulatory rules about selling biological material.

Will Biology Replace Mechanical Technology?
For the team at MIT, natto is just a jumping-off point. There are literally millions of other biological organisms out there to be studied. “We are very keen to unveiling and harvest responsive behaviors of microorganisms and repurpose/recompose them for design,” Yao said over email. “So far we know other microorganisms that react to light or electricity and swim in a certain pattern.”

Yet natto is a great example of the new way the lab is thinking about living organisms, though. It’s been around for a thousand years. Generations of people have used it. Yet only now are we discovering how it could serve a totally new purpose. What other bacteria, or microorganisms, could become living actuators that involve zero electronics, need no energy, and operate completely silently?

If our mechanical world dissolves into the ancient biological one, what other mechanical devices and networks will be replaced by smarter, safer, heartier organisms?

 

[Carach Angren]

Wifi Networks Can Now Identify Who You Are Through Walls

Who needs a peep hole when a wifi network will do? Researchers from MIT have developed technology that uses wireless signals to see your silhouette through a wall—and it can even tell you apart from other people, too.

The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what’s happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they’ve been busy developing the technique, and now they’ve unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.

Not only that, the team’s technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group’s website.

Seeing through walls
So how does it work? It’s actually relatively straightforward: a device transmits wireless signals on one side of the wall, which propagate through it and are then reflected by bodies on the other side. The device then captures the reflections, which are passed to software to be cleaned up. As you might expect, this part requires some pretty serious processing, as different body parts, humans and objects introduce all kinds of interference.

First, the team captures a series of frames of data before it does anything, to reduce the effects of random noise. “At a high level, we suppress noise by combining information across time and fitting the data into a model,” explained Fadel Adi, one of the researchers, to me via email. “For example, if you look at the video, you see that we capture consecutive time snapshots, before we can construct the human silhouette.”

Then, the team take the data they’ve managed to gather and feed it through algorithms that are trained to detect body-like features. “The algorithms that we developed fit all of these snapshots into a coarse human model with major body parts — such as head, chest, arms, and feet,” continues Adi. “That is, we combine these snapshots in a manner that maximizes the ability of the reconstructed silhouette in representing the human body.”

Given the small amount of information that’s received in the reflections, the system keeps constant track of what it can identify: sometimes it might be an arm and a head, other times a torso and a leg. It’s capable of stitching these glimpses together, in turn forming a full human silhouette. And given the world is made up of humans with a wide variety of body types, that data can be scrutinized a little further.

Silhouette fingerprints
In fact, the team has been using distinctive measures from these images, such as height, shoulder width and other body shape metrics, to identify different humans hiding behind a wall.

Using machine learning techniques, the researchers can train algorithms to spot the subtle differences in different people’s body shapes. “[W]e use the captured human silhouettes from our reconstruction algorithm [to] train a classifier on these silhouettes which allows us to distinguish between people,” explains Adi. “The classifier captures features like height and body builds, which allows us to distinguish between people using RF-Capture.”

In a series of tests, they’ve shown that the recognition capability can distinguish between 15 different people through a wall with nearly 90 percent accuracy. And in another series of experiments, where the team simply tracked the patterns they were capturing, they were able to trace a person’s hand as they wrote in the air. “The accuracy of tracking the moving hand is about an inch,” explains Adi.

Staying safe—and secure
The team is, understandably, excited about the applications that this kind of technology could provide. They’re already working, for instance, to develop a device that could sit in the home of your elderly grandparents, constantly scanning the house for their presence; if they were observed to have fallen over, the system could phone 911 on their behalf.

The team suggests that RF-Capture will get more accurate over time, too. “We are very excited about future research along two fronts: first, getting finer resolution to recover the silhouette with higher accuracy, and second, we would like to gain deeper understanding on the health front,” explains Professor Dina Katabi, one of the researchers involved in the project. “For example, can we track human fingers from behind a wall? We can [already] use RF-Capture to extract a person’s breathing and heart rate...can we detect heart problems using this wireless technology? We believe the answer is yes.”

If they can achieve that kind of detection, they suggest the technology could allow your smart home to sense your motion to, say, control video-games, control appliances depending on the way you move, or even perform on-the-fly health checks.

There is, of course, an elephant in the room here that you wouldn’t even need RF-Capture to identify — and that’s privacy. First off, the team insists that any device using this kind of technology, such as a router that can tell when your relative has fallen, uses encryption from the get-go. “We [also] want to ensure that people do not use it for malicious purposes,” adds Katabi. “To that end, we are working along two fronts: first, we are designing blockers that can prevent someone from being tracked except by their own device. And, second, we need to have regulations that dictate how and when these devices can be used. Privacy is always a chief concern.”

 

[Dubious]

Canadian students have invented a fridge that runs without electricity.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=435483326650029

 

[Slave_to_the_waffle]

Boston Dynamics' Robo-Dogs Pulling a Sleigh Is a Terrifying Glimpse of Christmas Future

If you thought waking up on Christmas morning to above-average temperatures and no snow on the ground was scary, Boston Dynamics gives us a far more terrifying glimpse into a dystopian future where Santa’s reindeer have been replaced with (highly kickable) trotting robotic dogs.

In this (what’s the opposite of heartwarming?) holiday video we see three of Boston Dynamic’s Spot bots, the younger sibling to the company’s BigDog, pulling a sleigh. If there’s one silver lining, it’s that Santa hasn’t been replaced by ATLAS—yet! Did Futurama teach us nothing?

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Q-carbon is harder than diamond, incredibly simple to make | ExtremeTech


Q-carbon is harder than diamond, incredibly simple to make

A new phase of carbon has been discovered, dubbed Q-carbon by its creators at North Carolina State University, and it has a number of incredible new properties. Not only does it appear to be harder than its close carbonaceous cousin, diamond, but it actually has properties the scientists themselves did not think possible. Q-carbon is ferromagnetic, something no other phase of carbon is known to be, and it even glows when exposed to energy. But, exciting as these things are, the most proximate application for Q-carbon is in back-conversion to more natural carbon crystals: With a simple melting process, Q-carbon can be turned to diamond under forgiving conditions.

One interesting thing about Q-carbon is that it’s so new, its own discoverers don’t make too many claims about exactly what it is on a chemical level. They make it by putting down layers of “amorphous carbon,” or unordered carbon molecules, onto a substrate like sapphire or glass. By laser-blasting these layers to above 4000K at atmospheric pressure, they can cause the whole thing to enter a molten state — and exactly how they allow this state to end and cool determines what they get at the end. Their studies went toward creating Q-carbon, which they say has mostly four-way carbon bonds, like those in diamond, but also a fair number of three-way bonds.


A micrograph of a q-carbon film, studded with nano diamonds.

In principle, this ought to make the crystal lattice less sturdy. But the researchers say that their non-homogenous crystal lattice could be “expected to possess novel physical, chemical, mechanical, and catalytic properties.”

They found such unexpected properties quickly enough. Though it would not even thought to be possible, it seems that in its Q-form, carbon can be ferromagnetic. It’s not like a super-magnet or anything, but the bare fact that this substance can react that way to an applied magnetic field is fascinating to materials scientists. And, of course, there’s the fact that Q-carbons seems to glow when exposed to even a small amount of energy.


“Too soft!” said the researchers.

Their technique can lay down layers of Q-carbon between 20 and 500 nanometers thick. These layers exhibit hardness well in excess of diamond layers, by as much as 60% if the researchers are correct. They suggest that this could be due to the shorter average carbon-carbon bond lengths in Q-carbon.

Depending on just how the Q-carbon is made, it can end up with embedded nano-diamonds, or diamond nano-needles, which are basically just areas of the Q-carbon which did fuse into the perfect diamond lattice structure. But they can also intentionally back-convert the Q-carbon to diamond nanodots, though the exact properties of that diamond aren’t detailed. It’s likely they’re going to be able to be made into gemstone quality, but the industrial diamond market is still enormous.

This isn’t the first time that the materials industry has claimed to have beaten diamond in one way or another. What sets this apart is the ease of the production process, and the fact that while Q-carbon is new and largely unknown, it can be converted to diamond, which is extremely well understood. We don’t know what uses scientists might find for this new phase of carbon, but since it can be created without the need for extreme conditions, there is at least a wide variety of researchers who are in a position to be able to find out.

 

[Slave_to_the_waffle]

Forgot this thread even existed.

Here's the Crazy Wing Bending Airbus Does to Stress Test Its Airplanes

You would never want to look out of your window on a flight and see the airplane wing bend like this but it’s nice to know that Airbus stress tests the hell out of their flying tubes to make sure that even if the wing is at such an obscene angle, it won’t snap in half. It’s really cool to see the process of pushing the Airbus A350 “to the brink” but I also love seeing the huge structure that houses the plane and all the cables involved in testing it.

Airbus writes:

Airbus’ thorough programme of static ground testing — including mechanical load and pressurisation evaluations — proves the A350 XWB’s structural limits before the aircraft can make its first flight.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Google: Our quantum computer is 100 million times faster than a conventional system | ExtremeTech

Google: Our quantum computer is 100 million times faster than a conventional system

Ever since quantum computer manufacturer D-Wave announced that it had created an actual system, there have been skeptics. The primary concern was that D-Wave hadn’t built a quantum computer as such, but instead constructed a system that happened to simulate a quantum annealer — one specific type of quantum computing that the D-Wave performs — more effectively than any previous architecture.

Earlier reports suggested this was untrue, and Google has now put such fears to rest. The company has presented findings conclusively demonstrating the D-Wave does perform quantum annealing, and is capable of solving certain types of problems up to 100 million times faster than conventional systems. Over the past two years, D-Wave and Google have worked together to test the types of solutions that the quantum computer could create and measure its performance against traditional CPU and GPU compute clusters. In a new blog post, Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, discusses the proof-of-principle problems the company designed and executed to demonstrate “quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.” He writes:

“We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 108.”



Neven goes on to write that while these results prove, unequivocally, that D-Wave is capable of performance that no modern system can match — optimizations are great and all, but a 100-million speed-up is tough to beat in software — the practical impact of these optimizations is currently limited. The problem with D-wave’s current generation of systems is that they are sparsely connected. This is illustrated in the diagram below:


D-Wave 2’s connectivity tree

Each dot in this diagram represents a qubit; the number of qubits in a system controls the size and complexity of the problems it can perform. While each group of qubits is cross-connected, there are relatively few connections between the groups of qubits. This limits the kinds of computation that the D-Wave 2 can perform, and simply scaling out to more sparsely-connected qubit clusters isn’t an efficient way to solve problems (and can’t work in all cases). Because of this, simulated annealing — the version performed by traditionally designed CPUs and GPUs — is still regarded as the gold standard that quantum annealing needs to beat.

How much of an impact quantum computing will have on traditional markets is still unknown. Current systems rely on liquid nitrogen cooling and incredibly expensive designs. Costs may drop as new techniques for building more efficient quantum annealers are discovered, but so long as these systems require NO2 to function, they’re not going to be widely used. Google, NASA, the NSA, and other supercomputer clusters may have specialized needs that are best addressed by quantum computing in the long-term, but silicon and its eventual successors are going to be the mainstay of the general-purpose computing market for decades to come. At least for now, quantum computers will tackle the problems our current computers literally can’t solve — or can’t solve before the heat-death of the universe, which is more-or-less the same thing

 

[Slave_to_the_waffle]

NASA Research Could Save Commercial Airlines Billions in New Era of Aviation

NASA Research Could Save Commercial Airlines Billions | NASA

Researchers with NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation project coordinated wind-tunnel tests of an Active Flow Control system -- tiny jets installed on a full-size aircraft vertical tail that blow air -- to prove they would provide enough side force and stability that it might someday be possible to design smaller vertical tails that would reduce drag and save fuel. Credits: NASA/Dominic Hart

The nation’s airlines could realize more than $250 billion dollars in savings in the near future thanks to green-related technologies developed and refined by NASA’s aeronautics researchers during the past six years.

These new technologies, developed under the purview of NASA’s Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project, could cut airline fuel use in half, pollution by 75 percent and noise to nearly one-eighth of today’s levels.

“If these technologies start finding their way into the airline fleet, our computer models show the economic impact could amount to $255 billion in operational savings between 2025 and 2050,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics research.

Created in 2009 and completed in 2015, ERA’s mission was to explore and document the feasibility, benefits and technical risk of inventive vehicle concepts and enabling technologies that would reduce aviation’s impact on the environment. Project researchers focused on eight major integrated technology demonstrations falling into three categories – airframe technology, propulsion technology and vehicle systems integration.

By the time ERA officially concluded its six-year run, NASA had invested more than $400 million, with another $250 million in-kind resources invested by industry partners who were involved in ERA from the start.

“It was challenging because we had a fixed window, a fixed budget, and all eight demonstrations needed to finish at the same time,” said Fayette Collier, ERA project manager. “We then had to synthesize all the results and complete our analysis so we could tell the world what the impact would be. We really did quite well.”

Here is a brief summary of each of the eight integrated technology demonstrations completed by the ERA researchers:

• Tiny embedded nozzles blowing air over the surface of an airplane’s vertical tail fin showed that future aircraft could safely be designed with smaller tails, reducing weight and drag. This technology was tested using Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator 757 flying laboratory. Also flown was a test of surface coatings designed to minimize drag caused by bug residue building up on the wing’s leading edge.
• NASA developed a new process for stitching together large sections of lightweight composite materials to create damage-tolerant structures that could be used in building uniquely shaped future aircraft that weighed as much as 20 percent less than a similar all-metal aircraft.
• Teaming with the Air Force Research Laboratory and FlexSys Inc. of Ann Arbor, Michigan, NASA successfully tested a radical new morphing wing technology that allows an aircraft to seamlessly extend its flaps, leaving no drag-inducing, noise-enhancing gaps for air to flow through. FlexSys and Aviation Partners of Seattle already have announced plans to commercialize this technology.
• NASA worked with General Electric to refine the design of the compressor stage of a turbine engine to improve its aerodynamic efficiency and, after testing, realized that future engines employing this technology could save 2.5 percent in fuel burn.
• The agency worked with Pratt & Whitney on the company’s geared turbofan jet engine to mature an advanced fan design to improve propulsion efficiency and reduce noise. If introduced on the next-generation engine, the technology could reduce fuel burn by 15 percent and significantly reduce noise.
• NASA also worked with Pratt & Whitney on an improved design for a jet engine combustor, the chamber in which fuel is burned, in an attempt to reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides produced. While the goal was to reduce generated pollution by 75 percent, tests of the new design showed reductions closer to 80 percent.
• New design tools were developed to aid engineers in reducing noise from deployed wing flaps and landing gear during takeoffs and landings. Information from a successful wind-tunnel campaign, combined with baseline flight tests, were joined together for the first time to create computer-based simulations that could help mature future designs.
• Significant studies were performed on a hybrid wing body concept in which the wings join the fuselage in a continuous, seamless line and the jet engines are mounted on top of the airplane in the rear. Research included wind-tunnel runs to test how well the aircraft would operate at low speeds and to find the optimal engine placement, while also minimizing fuel burn and reducing noise.

As part of the closeout work for the ERA project, information and results regarding each of these technology demonstrations were categorized and stored for future access and use by the aerospace industry, and will be discussed at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Sci-Tech Conference in San Diego this week.

 

[Blue Marlin]

NASA Research Could Save Commercial Airlines Billions in New Era of Aviation

NASA Research Could Save Commercial Airlines Billions | NASA

Researchers with NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation project coordinated wind-tunnel tests of an Active Flow Control system -- tiny jets installed on a full-size aircraft vertical tail that blow air -- to prove they would provide enough side force and stability that it might someday be possible to design smaller vertical tails that would reduce drag and save fuel. Credits: NASA/Dominic Hart

The nation’s airlines could realize more than $250 billion dollars in savings in the near future thanks to green-related technologies developed and refined by NASA’s aeronautics researchers during the past six years.

These new technologies, developed under the purview of NASA’s Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project, could cut airline fuel use in half, pollution by 75 percent and noise to nearly one-eighth of today’s levels.

“If these technologies start finding their way into the airline fleet, our computer models show the economic impact could amount to $255 billion in operational savings between 2025 and 2050,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics research.

Created in 2009 and completed in 2015, ERA’s mission was to explore and document the feasibility, benefits and technical risk of inventive vehicle concepts and enabling technologies that would reduce aviation’s impact on the environment. Project researchers focused on eight major integrated technology demonstrations falling into three categories – airframe technology, propulsion technology and vehicle systems integration.

By the time ERA officially concluded its six-year run, NASA had invested more than $400 million, with another $250 million in-kind resources invested by industry partners who were involved in ERA from the start.

“It was challenging because we had a fixed window, a fixed budget, and all eight demonstrations needed to finish at the same time,” said Fayette Collier, ERA project manager. “We then had to synthesize all the results and complete our analysis so we could tell the world what the impact would be. We really did quite well.”

Here is a brief summary of each of the eight integrated technology demonstrations completed by the ERA researchers:

• Tiny embedded nozzles blowing air over the surface of an airplane’s vertical tail fin showed that future aircraft could safely be designed with smaller tails, reducing weight and drag. This technology was tested using Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator 757 flying laboratory. Also flown was a test of surface coatings designed to minimize drag caused by bug residue building up on the wing’s leading edge.
• NASA developed a new process for stitching together large sections of lightweight composite materials to create damage-tolerant structures that could be used in building uniquely shaped future aircraft that weighed as much as 20 percent less than a similar all-metal aircraft.
• Teaming with the Air Force Research Laboratory and FlexSys Inc. of Ann Arbor, Michigan, NASA successfully tested a radical new morphing wing technology that allows an aircraft to seamlessly extend its flaps, leaving no drag-inducing, noise-enhancing gaps for air to flow through. FlexSys and Aviation Partners of Seattle already have announced plans to commercialize this technology.
• NASA worked with General Electric to refine the design of the compressor stage of a turbine engine to improve its aerodynamic efficiency and, after testing, realized that future engines employing this technology could save 2.5 percent in fuel burn.
• The agency worked with Pratt & Whitney on the company’s geared turbofan jet engine to mature an advanced fan design to improve propulsion efficiency and reduce noise. If introduced on the next-generation engine, the technology could reduce fuel burn by 15 percent and significantly reduce noise.
• NASA also worked with Pratt & Whitney on an improved design for a jet engine combustor, the chamber in which fuel is burned, in an attempt to reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides produced. While the goal was to reduce generated pollution by 75 percent, tests of the new design showed reductions closer to 80 percent.
• New design tools were developed to aid engineers in reducing noise from deployed wing flaps and landing gear during takeoffs and landings. Information from a successful wind-tunnel campaign, combined with baseline flight tests, were joined together for the first time to create computer-based simulations that could help mature future designs.
• Significant studies were performed on a hybrid wing body concept in which the wings join the fuselage in a continuous, seamless line and the jet engines are mounted on top of the airplane in the rear. Research included wind-tunnel runs to test how well the aircraft would operate at low speeds and to find the optimal engine placement, while also minimizing fuel burn and reducing noise.

As part of the closeout work for the ERA project, information and results regarding each of these technology demonstrations were categorized and stored for future access and use by the aerospace industry, and will be discussed at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Sci-Tech Conference in San Diego this week.

they work very closely with boeing when developing wings for the 787 and recently the winglets which the 737max has