FORWARD LOOKING IDEAS
Electric tilt-rotor can be self charging
AgustaWestland has sold tilt-rotor AW609 craft for several years. It recently unveiled the world’s first electric tilt rotor airplane. It’s known simply as Project Zero. As with other tilt rotor aircraft, Project Zero’s two rotors can be tilted
up to 90 degrees. This allows it to take off and land vertically and to
hover, like a helicopter, while also flying forward with the speed and
efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft. Each of the rotors are driven by
their own electric motor, which is powered by rechargeable batteries. When parked on the ground,
those rotors can be tilted to “windmill” in the oncoming wind, charging
the batteries as they do so.
The aircraft’s control
systems, flight controls and landing gear actuators are all
electrically powered. Because Project Zero’s electric motors don’t require
oxygen, the aircraft could conceivably fly at very
high altitudes or in heavily-polluted air. It should also be difficult
to detect, as it makes little noise and has a low thermal signature
while in flight.
The JWST is a large, infrared-optimized
space telescope. The project is working to a 2018 launch date. Webb will find
the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang
to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Webb will peer through dusty clouds to see stars
forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System.
Webb's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range
of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.
Webb will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter
and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won't
fit onto a rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open once Webb
is in outer space. Webb will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million
miles) from the Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope was named after the NASA Administrator who crafted the Apollo program, and who was a staunch supporter of space science
(YOU CAN WATCH IT BEING BUILT ON THEIR WEB CAM)
Teach your car the way home
Use your iPad to make your car into a self-driving
iPad robot
car.
The low-cost navigation system can recognise its surroundings
using small cameras and lasers discreetly built into the body of the car
and linked to a computer in the trunk. The technology is controlled
from an iPad on the dashboard that flashes up a prompt offering the
driver the option of the car taking over for a portion of a
previous familiar route by touching the screen to 'auto drive'
for the robotic system to take over.
"UFOs" on the highway
Audi has revealed a car lighting technology using thousands of tiny OLED colored lights that cover the width of the trunk to look like a moving "swarm" of
animals that respond to movement and the direction of the car. As the car speeds up the 'animals' move
faster.
The displays are designed to show other
drivers what the driver it doing or planning to do.
You have it see it to believe it.
.
If you would like a less "glamorous", but more informative video, click HERE.
(The OLED has made this kind of display feasible - not so sure about how useful)
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| OLED is flexible sheet organic LED |
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GIZMAG PROVIDES EVIDENCE THAT
“Just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be”
Australian scientists have successfully revived and reactivated the genome of an extinct frog. The "Lazarus Project" team implanted cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept in a conventional deep freezer for 40 years into donor eggs from a distantly-related frog. Some of the eggs spontaneously began to divide and grow to early embryo stage with tests confirming the dividing cells contained genetic material from the extinct frog.
Clawed micro-drone swoops up prey mid-flight
Here's something you don't see everyday: a Micro Unmanned Aerial vehicle (MAV) that can grab objects on the fly with all the elegance of an eagle snatching a fish from the water's surface. Although MAVs and UAVs are increasingly being equipped to pick up, transport, and drop off payloads, we've never seen this incredibly precise form of grasping on the fly replicated – until now.
Using the technique that created Dolly the sheep, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, have identified a way to produce healthy mouse clones that live a normal lifespan and can be sequentially cloned indefinitely. In an experiment that started in 2005, the team led by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama has used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SNCT) to produce 581 clones of one original "donor" mouse through 25 consecutive rounds of cloning.
One of the world’s oldest preserved beers to be reproduced
Produced at least as far back as 5,000 BC, beer has been with us for a long time. But coming third only to water and tea in terms of worldwide popularity means that the lifespan of individual beers is more likely to be measured in days or weeks rather than years or decades. The exception is if they’re preserved at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in a shipwreck. One such shipwrecked beer that is about 170 years old has been salvaged and analyzed and will be reproduced using modern industrial techniques.
CANADA GETS TOUGH ON CRIME
(by creating political crimes and making criminals out of innocent bystanders)
by Douglas J. Johnston, Winnipeg lawyer - from the Winnipeg Free Press March 16, 2013)
The Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, which amends
Canada's Criminal Code to allow a citizen's arrest within a
"reasonable" period of time after a crime occurs, came into force
this week. Prior to the amendments, a felon had to be caught red-handed for a
citizen's arrest to be lawful.
The amendments were dubbed the "Lucky Moose"
bill, after Toronto's Lucky Moose food mart, whose owner was charged with
assault and forcible confinement in 2009 after he and two employees chased
down, tied up and held a shoplifter until police arrived. The store owner,
David Chen, had witnessed the career thief (43 prior convictions) steal from
his store earlier that day, but he'd gotten away before Chen could act. When
the shoplifter returned an hour later, Chen nabbed him.
The case became a cause célèbre when the Crown attorneys'
office prosecuted Chen for trying to protect his property. He was acquitted at
trial.
The amendments have attracted their share of criticism.
Critics contend the bill encourages victims to take the law into their own
hands. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association sees it as leading to
"forms of vigilantism."
But the Lucky Moose amendments aren't the only
citizen-as-cop provision in the Criminal Code. In fact, they pale beside our
treason law. Because, where there's an alleged crime against the state, the law
deputizes us all.
The exercise of citizen's-arrest powers is voluntary --
you can, as ever, forget about apprehending a thief and just call the police.
Our treason law, however, dictates that you must get involved with the
crime-in-progress.
The Lucky Moose amendments also have the benefit of,
logically, involving only the players in a crime -- the victim and offender.
Our treason law ropes in witnesses, too, and turns them into criminals if they
don't do something to foil the plotters.
In short, the Criminal Code makes it compulsory to
protect the state, whether you want to or not.
An example: You're sitting in a local doughnut shop one
morning, sipping your coffee and munching your muffin, minding your own
business. Then, two tables over, you hear a couple of guys plotting what sounds
like a crime.
Do you have a legal duty to report them to the police? Or
to stop them from carrying out their plan? If they're working up a break and
enter, a drug deal or a robbery, the answer is "No."
But if it's treason they're scheming, you're obligated to
report them to the police, or to attempt to thwart their plot. If you don't,
you're guilty of a criminal offence. Sec. 50 (1) (b) of the Criminal Code of
Canada makes it a crime punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment if you
neglect your citizenly duty to report, or stop, them.
Nowhere else in our law is there an affirmative duty,
coupled with a major-league criminal penalty, either to warn police or
personally confront would-be offenders -- not even if what's being plotted is
murder.
A duty to report to authorities -- and merely report -- a
criminal plot may in and of itself not be a bad idea. However, applying it to treason
is.
Treason is one of the most nebulous crimes in our
Criminal Code. Lawyers, judges and legal academics have written volumes about
where legitimate political protest ends and treason begins, and when acts of
civil agitation morph into revolutionary insurrection.
It's also a notoriously elastic crime -- one that
suddenly loses its criminality when there's a regime change or the political
winds blow a different direction. Sixteenth-century English courtier Sir John
Harington's famous epigram -- cited in several judicial decisions -- nicely catches
its pliability:
Treason doth never prosper:
What's the reason?
For if it prosper,
None dare call it treason.
Nonetheless, the Criminal Code requires anyone sitting in
a doughnut shop to rush to judgment, decide whether it's a crime against the
state being discussed two tables over, and leap into action -- or maybe not.
That the state's coercive power is so heavily brought to
bear, not against wrongdoers, but mere witnesses, underscores the law's
transparent result: It doesn't target crime, it creates political crimes. Worse
yet, it makes criminals out of innocent bystanders.
Sec. 50 (1) (b) is an utterly unprincipled provision. It
so overreaches the acceptable limits of criminal law that it's an
embarrassment.
In the late 1980's it was on the political radar map for
repeal, but it disappeared from view.
It's possible, over time, that on the ground there will
be instances of excess in applying the new citizen's arrest law. But, next to
our treason law, its reach, and objects, are pretty modest.
The hormone, known as pregnenolone, is already sold over the counter as an anti-aging supplement, since it is a precursor to steroid hormones like estrogen and testosterone, which decline with age. The new research suggests it could treat people with marijuana use disorders — as well as alleviate symptoms related to accidental or over-doses of the drug. In the study, which was published in Science, the researchers found that pregnenolone is part of a feedback loop that regulates the the brain’s cannabinoid receptors, which bind to marijuana’s main active ingredient, THC. 
