Last October, near Karlsruhe, Germany, Thomas Senkel completed the first manned flight of an electric multicopter, flying it 10 feet off the ground for 90 seconds. Senkel, a physicist and paraglider pilot who helped found the company E-volo to build the craft, invented it after seeing a YouTube video of a German hobbyist’s remote-controlled hexacopter in … Read More → "German physicist flies first manned electric multicopter"

Last week, we discussed Circuit Playground for iOS, a comprehensive electronics reference manual. Android users can get in on the action with ElectroDroid, a collection of electronic reference information and tools available now in the Android App Market.

ElectroDroid offers a number of the same features as Circuit Playground, including resistor and inductor color-code decoders, resistance and reactance calculators, voltage dividers and voltage drop calculators, and more. You … Read More → "ElectroDroid is a reference for all of your DIY electronics and circuit building projects"

To date, quantum computers have been implemented so that programming their operation was, in essence, hardwired into their essential structure. Although many useful demonstrations of quantum computing have resulted from such special-purpose devices, they are basically one-problem computers which cannot easily be reprogrammed or scaled to attack larger problems. As early models of practical quantum computers, they don’t make the grade.

The basis of essentially all practical classical computers is the  … Read More → "Quantum computer with separate CPU and memory represents significant breakthrough"

In the future your children won’t just be competing against other children, they’ll be pitted against robots and computers too. What’s a parent to do? Teach them about the best parts of being human: curiosity and creativity. Researcher Jonathan Mugan is bringing his specialty in machine learning to the nursery. His book,Read More → "Want to prepare your kids for the singularity? Read Jonathan Mugan’s The Curiosity Cycle"

Todd Johnson’s Shockfossils are “multimillion volt Lichtenberg figures in acrylic.” He masks acrylic slabs with lead and then rents time on a commercial particle accelerator and the result are beautiful, fern-like fractals.
via Boing Boing

… Read More → "Acrylic fractal art made by bombarding slabs of plastic in a particle accelerator"

Approaching Alcoa’s 50,000-ton forging press feels a bit like approaching an alp: it starts out incomprehensibly huge and keeps getting incomprehensibly huger. From a distance, the thing dominates the horizon of the hangar-like Cleveland Works facility; as you get nearer, catching glimpses through forests of girders and around cliffs of firebrick, it begins to dominate the air above. But even as you stand at its foot, being told that the eight steel bolts anchoring it are 40 inches … Read More → "One of America’s great machines comes back to life"

Jaimie Mantzel is something of a mad scientist, but the best possible kind of mad scientist. Inventor extraordinare, Mantzel lives in a house that he built in the woods, subsisting on a budget of about $2,000 a year, using the resultant free time and bonus money to do awesome crazy things like build giant walking robots. Recently he’s developed some awesome minature walking robots, with amazing toy weapon peripherals and crazy armor; a true dream toy. All he need now is a name.
via Gizmodo</ … Read More → "Help inventor Jaimie Mantzel name his amazing fighting mech toys"

LIFE photographer John Olson’s series from 1971 of rock stars with their parents.

via Coudal

At a sneak preview in Hawthorne, Calif. on Thursday, electric car maker Tesla unveiled its third car, an all-electric SUV, minivan hybrid called the Model X, for the first time. And yep, true to the rampant speculation on the Interwebs, it’s got so-called “falcon wing” doors, which are a Tesla-designed double-hinged play on gull wing doors, named after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Falcon … Read More → "The first photos of Tesla’s electric SUV the Model X"

Holographic storage systems have been around for years now, but they haven’t taken off due to the expense and the lack of a clear advantage over competing storage mediums. A company called AON now claims to have developed a one centimeter cube that can store a terabyte of data in holographic, optically-encoded pages.

Holographic storage works on the same principle as holograms do: you take a laser, … Read More → "Company promises 1 cm, 1 terabyte holographic storage cube"