March 2010 Archives

Who needs wizards? We have scientists: Jetpacks are back, and the invisibility cloak is on the way

JETPACK? DONE that, been there. Invisibility cloak? Nah, it'll never happen. Those are the answers you used to get regarding those potential inventions. But advances in technology - as well as a dose of healthy tenacity - mean that consumers everywhere may soon have personal jPaks and iCloaks.

If his invention is not an elaborate prank, inventor and former biochemist Glenn Martin may find himself at the center of some attention. Because it looks like his company, the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft has finally built an operational jetpack.

For $90,000 (€66,681), about the price of a Porsche Hybrid, and if you were willing to wait a year for it to be custom-built, you could become the owner of a working jetpack.

Called rocket belts when the US military was testing them in the 1960s, previous versions had flight times of less than 30 seconds and were fueled by pressurized hydrogen peroxide.

The Martin Jetpack (MJ) runs on 5.28 gallons (20 liters) of service-station quality gasoline, has a range of 30 miles (48.3 km) and a top speed of 60 mph.

In an interview with New Zealand television, Martin said the device could carry a person of average weight for about 30 minutes. "I see it very much like a jet ski for the skies," said Martin, adding that his teenage son has even taken a test flight.

"I'm not quite the mad inventor; maybe [an] eccentric inventor," he noted.
Compared to the backpack-sized unit the Pentagon designed, at five-feet-square, the MJ is a beast! But there's a parachute built in, and if your hands are off the controls, it goes into autopilot and hovers in place.

Martin has signed a deal to supply MJs to a government, but he could not say which one.

WHO NEEDS MAGIC?
Also gaining notoriety are the inventors of the invisibility cloak. A team lead by Tolga Ergin at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, are in the process of creating a nanotech material that will "transform space," making a "carpet mirror" that bends light, rendering the wearer invisible.

With all those iCloaks out there, will jPaks come with built-in radar, or is that extra?

Color photos courtesy of Martin Aircraft Company
Other photo and illustration courtesy of US Department of Defense

If we really wanted to grab your attention, we should have illustrated this page with a dinosaur

IT WAS a great piece of legermain and the more I examined it, the more I appreciated it.

In mid-March, one news story was picked up by the various services of the blogosphere, and spread quite quickly: In all cases, the lede was about the hypothetical Nemesis star, a red dwarf in our immediate galactic area that supposedly exerts a level of gravitational force on the debris floating about the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system.

Every 26m to 65m years, Nemesis unwittingly sends a comet or asteroid at the Earth, blasting everything into extinction.

This is all hypothetical, you understand, no one is really certain what wiped out the dinosaurs. But these stories are great propaganda for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite telescope program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) latest project.

But WISE, usually mentioned in the final third of those various news stories I mentioned, is already fascinating enough: it does not need the bells and whistles of the alleged comet-murder of the dinosaurs for added public interest.

Not that I can blame NASA: slap a dinosaur on it, and the public comes running - myself included, no matter what it is .

Honestly, though, I'm glad the dinosaurs got killed: because if they didn't die, I wouldn't have fine petrochemical-based products to make my 21st century life so enjoyable.

EYE IN THE SKY
And speaking of 21st century products, the WISE telescope mission is pretty darn cool: Launched in December, made operational in January, WISE will take a photo every 11 seconds for a total of 1.5m snapshots of deep space.

Run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, over the six to 10 months of its mission, until the satellite's coolant runs out, WISE will take images in the 3 to 25 micrometre wavelength range of 99% of the sky with its infrared cameras.

The coolant is imperative, as the telescope is infrared, and needs to be cooler than the objects being photographed.

So if there is a Nemesis star out in the Oort, WISE should be able to pick it up.

By using 12,000 PET soda bottles, a handful of ecologists have become explorers, sailing the Pacific Ocean

AFTER A series of delays, the good ship Plastiki is scheduled to embark this month on a journey from San Francisco, where it was built, to Sydney, Australia, around 10,500 nautical miles (19,446km).

With the exception of masts constructed from recycled aluminum, the vessel is essentially completely built from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - including its sails.

The cabin is a PET geodesic construction that would make Buckminster Fuller proud - and at landfall can be used as shelter on dry land; the hull is made from roughly 12,000 two-liter PET soda bottles; and at journey's end, the vessel can be completely recycled. Again.

A two-hulled catamaran, Plastiki is estimated to be able to travel about 200 miles/day, and the trip is scheduled to take 100 days, during which Plastiki and her seven-member crew, headed by ecologist David de Rothschild, will investigate and retrieve samples from the gigantic sauce of plastic garbage that has coalesced in the North Pacific Gyre.

The trip is partially inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, where Heyerdahl showed that ancient, preindustrial man could have traveled from South America to the islands of the South Pacific - by sailing the route himself in an almost open-air reed boat. Hence the name Plastiki in tribute to Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki.

Some might have the hair-trigger reaction to think of de Rothschild as one of those dirty rotten hippies that hate the chemical industry, and who knows? Maybe he is.

However, the chemical industry nonetheless should be big enough to applaud his use of recycled PET in new and exciting forms.

Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I am figuring that the industry is eventually going to get blamed for that big Pacific Gyre, even though chemical producers cannot be there to pick up after every litterbug on the globe.

Be that as it may, it is with open-minded curiosity that I think we should hear what de Rothschild and the crew have to say after the expedition.

Yes, the whole thing could be a publicity stunt, but the Plastiki's crew's heart seems to be in the right place, so:
Godspeed, Plastiki, and smooth sailing!

Let us not praise the Hummer, but bury it - and hope the urge to drive monsters like it stays buried

THE UNDERWHELMING state of the American auto industry, both the poor sales and atrocious management, have clobbered the emotions.

One wants to feel something at the impending demise of the Hummer, especially for the 3,000 American autoworkers who face unemployment, but that behemoth was never built to engender sympathy.

Rising gas prices and the global financial crisis meant that the Hummer's end was nigh. In February, the Chinese government's refusal to back Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery's bid to buy the brand from General Motors- for a paltry $150m (€109.3m) - was a serious blow.

About five tonnes, getting 15 miles/gallon and tough to manuever on urban streets, the humongous vehicle was created in the mid-1980s as the US Army's replacement for the jeep.

Officially known as the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), it was quickly nicknamed "The Humvee" by soldiers, and in 1992, a street-legal version of the Humvee, renamed the Hummer for civilians, was introduced.

"This car was like the high-fructose corn syrup of automobiles, something that concentrated everything bad about motoring until it underwent a phase-change and somehow became an object of desire," author and columnist Cory Doctorow wrote about the Hummer, but Christopher Bateman, writing for Vanity Fair magazine, said it better: "The Hummer, as a means of civilian transportation, was just about the dumbest car in the world."

And it is hard to feel sympathetic about something like that disappearing.

No news is good news especially when broadcasters heap lies and insults on the chemical industry

What ABC News' website story, "Chemicals in Toys, Furniture May Face Tougher Standards," was trying to do, I'm not sure.

ABC News ostensibly had an article about how the American Chemistry Council, as well as industry giants like Dow Chemical and DuPont, support the new bill by Senator Frank Lautenberg (Democrat-New Jersey), a reform of 1976's Toxic Substances Control Act.

But if anything, the article takes the opportunity to give the chemical industry a beat-down. Author Dalia Fahmy writes, "Products on American store shelves now contain a whopping 89,000 chemicals, with a core group of 3,000 making up about 95% of the chemicals in use."

Ahhh, I get it: the author is taking that withered and dreadfully dull stance that all chemicals are an evil unleashed on the earth by Lucifer's minions.

Oh, Auntie, if only we could ban each and every chemical, then we'd never have to worry about people drowning in those evil lakes of di-hydrogen monoxide!

Do they know that there are at least 60 naturally occurring chemicals in the human body, including - gasp! - carbon. Isn't anyone thinking of the children? Something must be done!

Conspiracy? No thanks
It was reading the following quote that really enraged me, and set my fingers clattering across the keyboard:

"Although chemicals known to harm human health - such as mercury and asbestos - were making it into everything from computers to carpets, the government had no power to enforce bans. The chemical industry seemed untouchable."

Folks, let me tell you: It was never like Fu Manchu and Darth Vader got together in the back room of a saloon and came up with a plan to kill humanity via poisonous household products, you know? Mistakes were made, sometimes people got greedy, some people still are greedy, but there was never a conspiracy to do ill to customers - the last thing a company wants to do.

ABC News' story was shocking in how typical - and dull - it was in its tried and true methods of fear-mongering. C'mon guys, the chemical industry is an easy target; you've got to try a little harder to paint it with a black brush.