Chad's News

Researchers for the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s ‘Silent’ Aircraft Initiative have developed a conceptual design for a “silent” aircraft, which will greatly alleviate airport noise. As an added bonus, the design will increase fuel efficiency by about 25%. Because the initiative has quite a few partners from the aircraft industry, I think we may actually see this plane developed at some point.

http://www.physorg.com/…

Details on how it works: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Neatormama)

Can’t decide between DVD, Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD? Researchers have developed technology that can combine all three on one disc.

http://today.reuters.com/…

This Florida county is going to turn its 28-year old landfill into energy and construction materials. They will vaporize the trash using plasma arcs, producing gas (to run turbines) and a rock-like material that can be used in construction projects. They expect to fully consume the landfill in about 18 years. We need more of this kind of stuff!

http://www.usatoday.com/…

Samsung has developed a potential replacement for flash memory, Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM). It’s 30 times faster than flash, lasts 10 times longer, and is less expensive to manufacture. Expect to see it in 2008.

http://www.samsung.com/…

From the linked article: “BMW officially announced the Hydrogen 7 today. The car is touted as the first hydrogen-drive luxury performance automobile for everyday use.” It runs on hydrogen or gasoline.

http://www.autobloggreen.com/…

New technology for supersonic jets makes them much quieter, and we may actually see them in use over the continental United States. Maybe in another few decades they’ll be in common use (we can only hope).

http://www.wired.com/…
(via Engadget)

Ford has the technology to do away with removeable fuel caps. They’ll be phasing it in, starting with the higher-end vehicles.

http://www.nwfdailynews.com/…
(via digg)

A company named Freescale has gone into mass production with magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM). Its speed is much faster than Flash, but about an order of magnitude slower than current DRAM. If they can get the capacity increased (currently about 512KB), look for this to replace Flash memory. And if they can get the capacity and speed issues resolved, look for it to replace DRAM.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

This technology has the potential to radically change how we produce meat, but only if they manage to bring down the price. And it currently only works for ground meat. (I suppose they could make “steaks,” but they would be quite different from the steaks to which we’re accustomed.) While I’m not a hard-core animal rights activist, one neat side-effect of this process becoming ubiquitous would be the reduction in cruelty to animals.

http://www.wired.com/…
(via Digg)

I’ve heard various reports about this, from the initial creation of a device that disperses crowds of young people, to the actual use of ring tones in class with teachers who couldn’t hear it, but this article has a sound file to download. When I played it on my computer, I could hear a very slight hum and that was it. The creator had to ask his kids (or grandkids) whether or not the sound was bad enough to chase people away. The New York Times says you have to be over 40 or so in order not to hear it, but other articles give the cutoff age as 20.

http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Digg)

UPDATE: One person wondered just how degraded his hearing was, and he generated some test tones to find out. They are available for download here. My hearing is fine through 13,000 Hz then drops off sharply to the point where I can just barely hear 15,000 Hz.

UPDATE #2: Here’s a more recent link with tones at various frequencies. A friend of mine knows a lot about speakers, and he says part of the problem could be with my cheap computer speakers and not necessarily my hearing.

I guess this type of thinking comes more easily to a society with roots in central planning, but China has an official government agency whose job is to control the weather.

http://msnbc.msn.com/…

An extra $1200 for a flash-based “hard drive” is steep, but I expect the price to fall significantly over time. Hard drives are one of the weakest points in a computer system, mainly because of their mechanical nature. I just had one fail after many years of use, and it wasn’t pretty. A solid-state storage device would be a great improvement, both in speed and durability.

http://www.cio.com/…