Diehard cocktail aficionados swear by serving specific drinks in the correct glass. I wonder what they’ll make of the Levitating CUP, a cocktail glass designed to float above a portable base, in seeming defiance of gravity.
Hold on to your hats: The US Air Force has accelerated a sled down a magnetic levitation track at an incredible 633 mph, setting a new world record in the process.
Faster trains are finally coming to the United States, in cities like Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Las Vegas. Where will they appear next?
This weekend, millions were approved in funding for a high-speed rail project linking Baltimore and Washington, D.C. by maglev train. A day later, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation flew to Japan to see what riding one was like firsthand. These are two promising signs, my friends, for high-speed rail’s future in…
The Subway, the El, the Tube, the Métro: Trains have been transporting humans around cities since 1863. But too many public transit systems still run like they’re stuck in the 19th century. That needs to change.
In 1964, the last time Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics, the nation revealed one of the biggest mic drops in transportation history: the debut of the shinkansen, the world-famous bullet train that became a Japanese icon. The first high-speed train in the world, it spurred similar technology to spread to Europe and…
Magnets. You already know what they are and everything about them. Or do you? Magnets are crucial to many more emerging technologies than you might expect. The tried-and-true magnet is about to change everything–from how we drive and treat cancer to how we play sports.
High-speed trains—which can hit 300 miles per hour or more—are the ultimate example of how futuristic engineering can solve real-world transportation problems. In the past several decades, dozens of safe, sustainable high-speed train systems have started racing across the planet. And the place that does high-speed…
The Central Japan Railway Company’s maglev bullet train hit 366 miles per hour yesterday in a test, a record-setting clip that breaks the the 12-year-old landspeed record of 361 mph, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The most inefficient part of a gearing system is also its most vital: the teeth. While they allow the systems to, y'know, work, they also introduce vast quantities of frictional losses and, in turn, mechanical wear—so this new system uses magnetic levitation to do away with them.
The world's fastest train – a maglev vehicle operated by the Central Japan Railway Company capable of speeds in excess of 500km/h (~311mph) – is currently undergoing eight days of public testing. Short runs began Saturday, with 100 passengers making the 42.8 km trip from Uenehora to Fuefuki in about five minutes.
The world's fastest mag-lev train, the 311 mph Series Lo prototype from JR Tokai, made its first public run on Saturday. One hundred lucky passengers took part in a 27-mile trip between Uenohara and Fuefuki...which took just five minutes to complete once the train got up to speed.
SkyTran—a NASA Space Act company—is finally building a pilot of its computer-controlled, two-person high speed maglev transport system. Cars run 20-feet above the ground and can be ordered by a smartphone app.
A research team in China just successfully tested a blisteringly fast transportation concept: super-maglev, a high speed train that could theoretically hit speeds of up to 1,800 miles per hour. That's three times the speed of a passenger jet.
Tel Aviv is set to begin construction on the world’s first magnetically levitating skyTran system of mass transit. Which is awesome because it's fine time that our cities started to look the way scifi says they’re supposed to.
The fastest train in America, the Amtrak Acela line running from Boston and DC tops out at 110MPH. Sure, that's way faster than taking a Greyhound, but pathetically pokey compared to the 311MPH bullet of the Mag-Lev train currently being developed by Japan's JR Tokai.
Today in grandiose space ambitions that would make even Newt Gingrich balk: a $60 billion, 1,000-mile long, 12-mile high, 20,000-miles-per-hour maglev train that starts on the ground and arrives in low Earth orbit. The minds behind the Startram project think it could reduce the cost per kilo (that's like 2.2 pounds…
This is Startram, a proposed launch system that would use magnetic levitation trains, a 1000-mile tunnel, and a superconducting cable to reach low Earth orbit. Amazingly, we already have the technology to do it...at far less than the cost of rockets.
Andrew A. Kucher [right] with Anastas I. Mikoyan [left] (Life Magazine, 1959)
The car's come a long way since Ford started mass production 100 years ago, but science fiction takes transportation even further. Here are six scenarios for the future of driving, and the real-life developments that could make them happen.
