In the 1950s, Ford Motor’s vice-president pushed for a flying car
In 1958, you’d find no greater advocate for the hovercar than Ford vice president Andrew A. Kucher. Kucher was on a media blitz in the late 50s and early 60s, being quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mechanix Illustrated, Chicago Daily Tribune, Popular Mechanics, Automotive Fleet and above in Arthur Radebaugh‘s syndicated…
Phase IV, a film about super-smart Communist ants and movie scientist gobbledygook
Phase IV is a 1974 science fiction insect fear film directed by famed title sequence creator Saul Bass and starring Michael Murphy, Nigel Davenport and Lynn Frederick as two scientists and a Breck Girl who become trapped in a desert research station while investigating hyper-intelligent ants. This is well and good, but does it make…
Can we determine the position of clappers’ hands from the sound of their applause?
Primitive though they may be, given just a simple audio recording of a single handclap, is it possible to determine the hand-configuration of the clapper via a computer-assisted digital analysis of the sound? Researchers Antti Jylhä and Cumhur Erkut at the Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Helsinki University of Technology, TKK, Espoo, Finland…
New demolition robot rips through walls, snips rebar, and turns concrete into dust
Need to take down some infrastructure? Turn to the new F-16, a demolition robot that can easily break down stairwells, concrete slabs and walls. For a full spectrum of destructive power, it uses shears, breakers, grapples, a drop hammer, buckets and a concrete-pulverizing claw. The electrically powered robot rolls on a tank-like track, with four…