The monstrous Sky Whale could be the future of air travel

This concept plane is called the AWWA Sky Whale and it's the brainchild of Spanish designer Oscar Viñals. Should it ever leave the ground, the three-floor aircraft would hold 755 passengers and be powered by four large hybrid engines.

The concept plane was designed with current and future technologies in mind, including micro-solar panels that could charge the engines, self-healing skin with adaptable opacity, active wings to reduce turbulence, and advanced alloys, ceramic and fiber composite materials.

Its engines could rotate up to 45 degrees in a vertical position to assist during take-off and landing, thus reducing the distance of the runway.

Adicionar legenda:

Viñals has even designed the plane such that it would break apart on an emergency landing to limit damage.

fonte: io9.com

An Italian scientist has taken 37 years worth of data from both Voyager space probes and turned it into music.

The composer, Domenico Vicinanza, is a project manager at Géant — Europe's high-speed data network that powers Cern and the Large Hadron Collider.

He used 320,000 individual measurements of cosmic particle data taken at one-hour intervals using the spacecrafts' cosmic ray detector.

To make this data sound musical, Vicinanza mapped different frequencies, or detections, to different frequencies of a note. And to distinguish between the two spacecraft, he created a kind of duelling duet by giving each probe its own arrangement and sound texture.

"I wanted to compose a musical piece celebrating the Voyager 1 and 2 together, so used the same measurements (proton counts from the cosmic ray detector over the last 37 years) from both spacecrafts, at the exactly same point of time, but at several billions of kilometres of distance one from the other,"

said Vicinanza in a Guardian article.

link. :