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The Best of What's New From Popular Science
Wrathie writes ""The top 100 technological innovations of 2003, from aviation to defibrillation, GPS to Wi-Fi, rotary to rockets. The year and the gear that was." This article from Popular Science magazine is quite extensive."
Though that Mag-train is beautiful.
Funny that they claim it's the world's first. I'm not sure what the criteria for 'first' is (other than the blatantly obvious) but at Expo '86, Japan had a working maglev train which was whisper quiet. It only ran for about 100m in length, back and forth, but it was certainly viable. You'd think in 17 years there would have been an implementation of this successful technology.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The Shanghai Transrapid is the first in regular, scheduled, commercial travel.
The idea is much older (the first patent was granted 1934), and the system has been in test runs since the seventies.
More can be read here: http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html
The manufacturers have a well-made site in English, French, and German (naturally, although the PopSci article neglects to mention that the Shanghai Transrapid was built by a German consortium).
You should get your facts right.
1) The new rating is 238. The old rating was 247. While various people have dyno'd and believe the true rating is below 238, there's some question as to if this is due to the car being too smart for single axel dynos and limiting performance if it doesn't detect the front wheels moving (plenty of BMWs do this too).
At any rate, the car's perfectly capable of pulling a "less than 6.0" 0-60. 5.9 secs if you want to be precise.
2) Yes, 159 lb-ft of torque is less than 160... It also redlines at 9000 rpms. It's a sports car so you rev it high and leave it there (and eat your gas bill). This isn't particularly different from the WRX (which admittedly isn't as bad) or S2000 both of which also lack low end torque (the WRX needs to get its turbos going before the fun really starts).