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The solar may be helpful in some respects (like providing the power for the life-support systems on the ship), but I'm talking about a return to classic sail cargo ships like used for all shipping before motorized ships became popular.

I did a quick search and was glad to find some articles confirming that many people are indeed thinking about exactly these things:

https://www.machinedesign.com/...
https://www.popularmechanics.c...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...

It seems likely that autonomous cars could lower that number significantly.

This is definitely true, but getting to SAE level 4 is required. At SAE level 3, the driver needs to sit there babysitting the vehicle, which is a worse user experience than actually driving yourself.

The "every small part you ever need at your fingertips at home" revolution didn't happen.... or maybe hasn't happened yet.

But 3D printing is definitely revolutionary in the business world. People are just figuring out how to use the technology now, but it is already having an impact at the very high end... like SpaceX making parts of their super-draco engines with 3D printing. Or 3D printed automotive parts.

Sure, we don't have laser-sintered makerbots available for $75 that can print any tool or part you need in your garage.... but it isn't like 3D printing is a bust.

Engineers tend to be conservative; scientists tend to be liberal. The latter are the dreamers, the theoreticals, the former are the ones who have to make it work in the real world, the implementers. Maybe that's the breakdown? In theory versus practice? Dreamer versus doer? Tends to fit the "liberal versus conservative" positions in the US rather well...

Print:
1) The Economist. Very informative. Their politics are not hidden, and socially, they're definitely left of center. Financially, they're the "Voice of the Plutonomy." But, it works. The articles are typically quite informative.

Online magazines:
1) IEEE Spectrum
2) Communications of the ACM
3) Dr. Dobbs
4) Infoworld
5) Linux Journal
6) Machine Design

And a variety of online information sources for current events. Typically, Google and Google News are good starting points.

LED room lights will double as "Li-Fi" wireless nodes

Li-Fi Multi-tasking micro-lights could spark a communications revolution

There was a case where a bug in the steamy load of Adobe's PDF viewer was used to jailbreak phones
http://blog.machinedesign.com/Machine_Design_Blogs/2010/08/16/hackers-exploit-adobe-bug-to-jailbreak-iphones/

Quick update just found out that beacon power is working on a shaftless design which would eliminate mechanical linkages.

http://machinedesign.com/article/reinventing-the-flywheel-0811

IEEE Spectrum Magazine: A highly accessible magazine for the lay person and well in front of technology issues: http://spectrum.ieee.org/

Machine Design Magazine: http://machinedesign.com/?p=1 (and coincidentally, first story is about 3D printers)

In this case, consider the fire triangle: fuel, heat, oxygen.

Fuel? Maybe. In an air race, the lighter the plane the faster the plane, since more weight = more lift and more lift = more drag. So the planes are as lightly loaded on fuel as possible. Halfway or more thru the race, the remaining fuel is even lower; these planes burn it fairly quickly at high throttle. The stock fuel capacity of a P-51D Mustang is 269 gallons; this plane probably had about a quarter of that at impact.
http://www.mustangsmustangs.com/p-51/survivors/pages/44-15651.shtml
This article says another famous P-51 racer (Dago Red) carries 150 gal of 180-octane avgas at takeoff.
http://machinedesign.com/article/unlimited-air-racers-the-ultimate-hot-rods-1103

Oxygen? Plenty.

Heat? Lots in the area of the engine, not so much elsewhere. Also, the heat has to be in a place it can ignite the fuel/oxygen mix. If the fuel has not been properly mixed with oxygen, no amount of heat will ignite it. At the speed that airplane hit the pavement, the engine probably embedded itself a couple feet deep in tarmac before the fuel even began to vaporize, so most of the hot metal was out of the picture.

180 octane is ridiculously high (160 is probably a more realistic number); it's actually designed to be very hard to ignite inside the engine, so that the pistons are not destroyed by early ignition due to the extreme compression at which these engines run. I don't know how that relates to an impact-caused vapor cloud, however.

Finally, this doesn't exclude an explosion; it was still POSSIBLE, but some good fortune was involved. Not a pretty day for anyone involved, but it could have been even worse if it HAD ignited.

OK, I was referring to the ICE plus electric kind. They do make an alternative, the hydraulic hybrid boost (and/or complete hydraulic drive), that is already out there in some city delivery trucks and buses. It captures braking force and pressures it, then it adds the boost needed to get going again from a stop. Does it loads cheaper than the electric "regenerative braking" version. Now these sorts of hybrids I can see being useful in a number of scenarios, heck, most vehicles could use it. That's really the big waste in stop and go urban driving, all that starting and stopping inertia. It's fairly efficient in recovery, easily as good as or superior to the electric kind, also easier for the manufacturers to get into, hydraulic and air brakes are by far and away the most common now anyway. Some info, various ideas, random google selection

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/parker-20091018.html

http://machinedesign.com/article/hydraulic-hybrids-boost-fuel-economy-1012

http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-top.pag?docid=6752777&ctxixpLink=FcmCtx7&ctxixpLabel=FcmCtx8

As to the electric generator trailer and the electric vehicle, pretty much doable today at a normal entry level ICE vehicle budget. They make kits now to convert real common vehicles (as in by used and cheap to start the project with), like ford rangers or chevy s-10s (some sedans but I forget which ones now they recommend, I am in favor of smaller pickups over sedans for electric vehicles, they can haul the weight better and still have useable cargo and room space). One just needs then a normal landscaper type lightweight steel mesh framed trailer, the kind you see people towing that have a riding lawnmower on them and a few tools, etc, home depot or wherever special, relatively cheap, the generator, can be cheap to expensive, just a judgement call there, some u-bolts to clamp the thing down over the balance point on the trailer axle, add a starter battery on the nose for the down weight needed for attachment, and maybe some additional fuel tank action, etc then sill room for cargo. Probably need to make your own jumper cable thing, not that hard, to connect to the vehicle charge point. Now I am *guessing*, but I would bet you could just about get real close to a new prius price, and have pure electric instead with the genny trailer doing it this way.

  You are basically just trading the cash you would have put into an advanced battery system, that is *still* limited, into a more affordable generator system for the once in awhile long trip, and then just having a modest battery system instead. Which also has the benefit of as battery tech advances, you can buy into it easier and cheaper, because you just don't need that many batteries total.

I even noted around a six (to ten) grand NEV modular hybrid type thing that could be assembled completely in one trip at my local home depot before. Not exactly a commuter experience, but you can see the potential there is real close now to this being affordable, the vehicle itself just needs to be a little more realistically a car, say add five more grand to it to get it out of the NEV class, then do the trailer idea with it.

http://slashdot.org/~zogger/journal/207291

This; http://machinedesign.com/article/throw-out-the-textbooks-diesel-airplanes-are-here-0619 is a production airplane already getting 133 passenger miles per gallon per the contest conditions. its a 4 seater in current configuration but has a 950 lb load rating with full fuel. so if we assume 170 lbs per passenger 6 passengers would put you 70 lbs over max. lose 10 gallons of fuel and your back to overall weight. this would give you 200 passenger MPG of course two would have to ride in the luggage bay but you would still be within the planes limits. feel free to correct me if my math is off but if not and you decide to go do it and win, well 10 grand as a finders fee would be nice!!!

The small motors used in typical hybrids are over 90% efficient going forwards and over 85% efficient acting as a generator.

And the ones used in diesel-electric locomotives add another 7% to that. ANY motor big enough for a car will be efficient if properly built.

For sports cars.

For all cars Otherwise, why is no production hybrid using one?

Actually, the tesla roadster is coming equipped with a two-speed sequential gearbox plus reverse. This is necessary because the vehicle is a super high performance car and it needs to hit high speeds. Commuter cars don't need two forward gears, so they don't need any gears (except perhaps as part of the mechanism which drops the shaft, if any) so they don't need a reverse gear, either.

Your news is old, they ended up tweaking the motor to spin even faster as they couldn't solve the problems with the two speed transmissions.

A "generator-motor" system is called a "series hybrid", whether you have batteries or not.

I'd tend to disagree; without any way to store the electrical power, the system is unable to decouple fuel usage and motive force; or recover energy via regenerative braking. If it's considered a hybrid; it's a pretty weak one.

So far attempts to use a single power system to do meaningful regenerative braking on that scale have failed.

Source? What do you consider 'meaningful' regenerative braking? Still, current production hybrids use NiMH batteries; with a 66% charge efficiency, meaning that discounting generator/motor losses you lose a third of your energy just charging the battery. Going by your 85% generator and 90% motor, that's 50% recovery stop to go. LiIon is 99.9% efficient done right, increasing the overall efficiency of regenerative braking to 76%. Might lose a bit of efficiency with the control circuits as well, but I think that's included in the motor efficiencies. Anyways, that's effectively 50% more energy, which means 50% more miles recovered from the stopping energy. Would boost the effective mileage of stop and go city driving quite a bit. Let's see Toyota boasts about it, Lexus claims it, Ford claims it.

The only thing limiting the usage of regenerative braking is the power of the electric motor and that it can only be applied to the wheels hooked up to the drive train. IE if you have a front wheel drive hybrid, braking lightly enough to only use regenerative braking will only have drag on the front wheels. Not actually that bad - regenerative braking is naturally anti-lock.

If you don't care about regenerative braking and batteries, then there's really no reason why you would need that many batteries, or for that matter, any at all beyond what you need to start the engine which runs the generator.

I have always figured the ideal solution was to build a generator into a turbine (to reduce the weight of the generator.) Chrysler drove a turbine-powered car across the country in the 1960s. My understanding is that it ate transmissions. I aim to eliminate the transmission. If your generator is not large it had better be fast. Turbines are fast. Seems like the perfect match, to me.

Right now though, fast small turbine = inefficient loud turbine. Atkinson style IC engines are quieter, more efficient, and need less maintenance.

Electronic control is becoming more common anyway. There's a lot of small-to-medium sized equipment with an electronically-controlled hydraulic drive, now. And if I were designing some

Actually for most electric motors, the torque peaks at 0 rpm.

Close, but not quite. I don't exactly remember why the curve looks like that, something do to with inductive reactance.

According to this site, a gallon of liquid hydrogen has about as much energy as a pint of gas.

http://machinedesign.com/BasicsOfDesignEngineeringItem/714/65761/Connectors.aspx is a decent place to start. Gold conducts better than nickel, so if you're not unplugging your cable 20 times a night, it's better. Gold over nickel is common though, so I don't know wtf GP is talking about.

Not only IT jobs.
See:
http://machinedesign.com/ContentItem/71819/LelandTeschlersEditorialFinallythetruthaboutengineeringjobs.aspx

An editorial.Finally, the truth about engineering jobs
Members of the U.S. House got a surprising message during a recent meeting on Americas science and engineering workforce: Everything they thought they knew about science and engineering employment was wrong.
  Specifically, there is no shortage of scientists or engineers. In fact, there are substantially more scientists and engineers graduating in the U.S. than there are jobs

this article is bullshit. the whole thing was staged. Now we all know what a killacycle is. Go buy the and ENV http://machinedesign.com/ContentItem/58517/Motorbikerunsonhydrogen.aspx

Hmm, some metal strapping, double sided sticky tape and a pop-riveter comes to mind...

You can actually buy shock mounted drive sleds, so you can screw the sled to the case wall and the drive will ride on little shock absorbing pots - used in military schtuff - horribly expensive.

Alternatively, you can use foam pads or rubber grommets to suspend the drives:
http://pdf2html.spawncamp.net/pdf2html.php?url=htt p://www.equipmentprotectionmagazine.com/images/Sho ckControlPortableElectronicsWlinks.pdf
http://www.earsc.com/applications.asp?id=105&child id=29&parentid=28
http://www.machinedesign.com/ASP/strArticleID/5694 1/strSite/MDSite/viewSelectedArticle.asp

I got through to Machine Design on the first attempt.

The story linked to above is a summary of this article:

Giving soldiers a high-tech leg up
http://machinedesign.com/asp/viewSelectedArticle.a sp?strArticleId=59627&strSite=MDSite&catId=2

I hate it when people post front page articles that just link to some kids blog who THEN links to the posted article, i thought the internet was about cutting out middlemen and going straight to the source ? anyway the original article with better pics etc....

Giving soldiers a high-tech leg up

I think this is the link we want http://machinedesign.com/asp/viewSelectedArticle.a sp?strArticleId=59627&strSite=MDSite&catId=2

Is this link broken?? keeps tellin me... Either this or this article seems to work though??

http://machinedesign.com/asp/viewSelectedArticle.a sp?strArticleId=59627&strSite=MDSite&catId=2

the seamy side.

Note: BERSERKER is a registered trademark of Fred Saberhagen and can not be used without permission.

"Unless the heater in the Prius is somehow different from about every other vehicle's on the road, it cannot run on electricity. A car heater is run by blowing air over basically a small radiator (heater core) that the 190F engine coolant cycles through. If the Prius's engine shuts off, the water pump will probably stop and so will the heater. "

Err ... no.. The Prius's Heater is quite different.. (IMHO ... Far Superior). .

Machine Design 2004 Toyota Prius

"After 1,500 miles of driving in some of the coldest January temperatures on record, I'd summarize the 2004 Toyota Prius as a quiet, roomy car that happens to have a hybrid drivetrain and an excellent heater. Quick heat is no fluke. The Prius stores some coolant in an insulated reservoir when it shuts down. Later, when restarted, the stillhot coolant circulates into the engine primarily to reduce emissions, but an additional benefit is near-instant heat. This is one of several unusual features on this car.";

It's fail safe. In the event of a system failure, it can only fail to launch. Once started, it can stop even if it loses power completely, according to this article.

It also depends on what type of electric motor you're using. A series DC motor will give you the best 0 RPM torque. That's like the starter in your car. Some electrical motors, like the single phase hysteresis motor in your vaccuum cleaner doesn't give you much torque at all at 0 RPM, but just enough to get it moving. Synchronous AC motors may be the same way.

This is all a bit foggy for me now, but I'm pretty sure not all electric motors give their Max torque at 0 RPM.

Read more here.

Looking at these rockets it seems that a trusty old Delta IV could do the job. The Delta series of rockets have proven reliablity and are fairly cost effective.

I was surprised to learn that TTD actually uses cables. Here is a good rundown of the tech of TTD.

Another Canadian team, the da Vinci Project in Toronto, is also building a rocket. But their rocket won't fire its engines until it's already 80,000 ft off the ground and tethered beneath a reusable, piloted helium balloon. It will hang in an 80 up angle. After starting its engines and cutting the tether, it will fly a 90, straight up profile. This lets the designers reduce the propulsion system to one-fourth of what a ground-launch would require. The craft, weighing 7,200 lb on take off (3,200 lb, empty), uses two kerosene and LOX engines, each generating 5,000 lb of thrust, to take it the rest of the way to 100 km. The engines are newly designed with emphasis on light weight, reliability, and low cost.

A helium-fueled cold gas-reaction control system (RCS) will give the ship attitude control. The pilot uses two control sticks, one for main-engine gimbals, the other for the RCS, or relies on an autopilot. Like other X-Prize contestants, the da Vinci rocket uses an inflated shuttlecock or ballute to increase drag on descent.

Just adding to what you have to say here...

A lot of that is due to shock-loading. :) Chrysler's mighty 727 TorqueFlite automatic was designed to live behind a 426 Hemi; even slamming it into gear with the throttle pegged won't hurt it thanks to the torque converter's isolation.

And this is why most drag racers use modified automatics - essentially, an "brainless" automatic which needs you to tell it when to shift. It's called a manual valve body. Even a very primitive automatic like the (two speed and bulletproof) GM PowerGlide of the 1950s and 1960s can shift faster than most human beings. And being able to use the clutch consistently is very difficult when you're dealing in terms of tenths of a second; automatics are free of that.

Remember shift overlap. Passenger car automatics engage a gear then release the previous one - you're in first, you're in first and second, then you're in second. The reason this is done is to reduce jerk. In fact, in Calculus, the term "jerk" (derivative of acceleration) was coined by GM engineers.

A big improvement in fuel efficiency could be had by simply removing that overlap (as anyone building an automatic for performance or racing will do, check out the RWD Valve Body Assembly on the 18th page of this Mopar Performance Catalog PDF) but Joe Consumer will complain if the car accelerates like a heavy-clutched stickshift. (Note the "Race Only" warning on the valve body assembly's caption.)

Apparently the revie w in Machine Design says that "The screen uses a liquid-crystal display and an illumination plate. The LCD generates translucent colors while the plate carries light lines or pencil-thin light generators that run the height of the unit and are spaced on a two-pixel pitch. The plate also holds lenticular lenses that direct light at a slight angle. The LCDs are wired so that every other column displays image information intended for a viewer's left eye and the other columns for the right. In the current design, both halves of a stereo pair are displayed simultaneously. Several people can view stereo images at once.".

This sort of makes more sense if you see the diagrams on the page, but I would have thought that it would require you to be pretty much directly in front of the screen and viewing it at a perpendicular angle, (from a certain distance) otherwise you are going to start receiving the wrong information to each eye.

However, once you have it calibrated for your eye seperation, I see no reason why you shouldn't get really strong stereoscopic images. When's the next trade show near Brussels so I can try it out?

Interesting side point: The press on this form of 3d vision on their web site dates back to 1994 so it's not exactly cutting edge (unless they've recently undergone a quantum leap forwards and I haven't picked up on this from the site).