For the past few days, I’ve been jumping-out-of-my-shoes excited from reading the cover story of the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine entitled “The New Industrial Revolution,” by long-tail theorist Chris Anderson, and the related issue of Make magazine, the theme of which is “Desktop Manufacturing.”

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This excellent video from the TED Talks website deals with biomimicry, the concept of getting engineering inspiration from the natural world.

From the abstract: With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with.

In this inspiring talk, Janine Benyus provides fascinating examples of biomimicry — the way humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement. And because the champion adapters in the natural world are, by definition, those that can survive without destroying the environment that sustains them, biomimicry can contribute to the long-term health of our planet.

I really enjoyed watching this hour-long talk by Jonathan Oxer, entitled “Hardware/Software Hacking: Joining the Real and the Virtual,” which addresses the growing trends in physical computing, and the process of connecting the physical world with the virtual.

~ from Google Tech Talks, July 31, 2007

ABSTRACT

Software developers usually confine themselves to working entirely within the runtime environment of a computer just pushing around bits and pixels. Even virtual worlds such as Second Life exist only in the confines of our CPUs.

On the other hand, hardware hacking has really taken off in recent years and there are now magazines such as MAKE devoted to modifying everyday objects. It’s a lot easier than software jockeys may expect, and this talk will begin with an entertaining exploration of simple ways to get started with linking a computer to real-world objects.

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On August 6, 1997, Korean Air flight 801, a Boeing 747, crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam, with 237 passengers on board. The airplane had been cleared to land at Guam International Airport and crashed into high terrain about 3 miles southwest of the airport. 228 people were killed, and the airplane was destroyed by impact forces. Post-crash analysis revealed no mechanical defects with the aircraft (NTSB, 1997).

The National Transportation Safety Board calls this type of accident Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT), in which a functioning airplane is essentially flown into the ground due simply to the pilots’ lack of a clear picture of where they are (Arthur, 2003). According to a study from the Flight Safety Foundation, nearly 80 percent of all fatal airline accidents can be attributed to CFIT or approach-and-landing accidents (North, 1999). Clearly something needs to be done to address this situation and reduce these preventable pilot-error accidents.

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by Robert C. Truax, January 1999

Copyright © 2000 Aerospace America.   Reprinted with permission.

The story of turbopump rocket development is an interesting one of trial and error. Many sidelines were explored before the objectives of light weight and high performance were finally attained with the main engines for the Shuttle. Russian rocket development followed a somewhat similar path, and the end result was very similar: a topping cycle with high combustion chamber pressures.

But turbopump engines, whether high pressure or low, were a mistake from the very beginning. They simply are not worth what they cost in time and money. In all the early development efforts, pump-fed systems were preceded by a pressure-fed version. In every case, the mission was accomplished and the program goals met before the development of the pump system was completed. After the X-I broke the sound barrier with its pressure-fed rocket engine, who ever heard of the D-558-2 — powered by a pump-fed engine?

Technically simple two-stage launchers with pressure-fed engines and ocean recovery offer the economical operations that have escaped our high-technology turbopump rockets for more than four decades.

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