NASA is investing in eco-friendly supersonic airplane travel

Unless you have access to a F-22 fighter jet, you probably haven’t been able to fly faster than the speed of sound since the last Concorde flight in 2003. NASA wants to change this. The agency said that it is spending over $6 million to fund research into cheaper and greener supersonic travel.



The future of flight? (NASA)

This isn’t NASA’s first attempt to bring back supersonic travel. The agency has been (literally) pushing the boundaries of flight for years. NASA’s predecessor was involved in building the first supersonic plane in 1946, and the agency has been working on concepts since 2006 with companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing that may one day lead to a new generation of planes that get you places very quickly.

The largest awards of this round of funding went to MIT and Wyle Laboratories, a research contractor in Virginia, to investigate the environmental impact of commercial supersonic flight and how turbulence affects sonic booms, respectively.

MIT’s study will be looking into updating the environmental impact models created for NASA in the ’80s and ’90s. While many modern fighter jets have the ability to fly faster than the speed of sound, the environmental impact is relatively small, because there just aren’t thatmany fighter jets in operation. It would be a different case if commercial jets were capable of supersonic flight. There are roughly 7,000 flights over the US alone at any given time, all burning fuel to stay up there. Supersonic flight burns more fuel—albeit for a shorter period of time—than a traditional jet engine. NASA said that supersonic jets also travel at higher altitudes than regular jets, closer to the stratosphere, and so they have a greater potential to damage the ozone layer.

Another big chunk of the funds went into research on how to make supersonic travel quieter. For anyone who has ever been near the Concorde’s flight path, they’ll know that it was really, really loud. If supersonic jets are to become the norm, they’re going to have to get a lot quieter, or we’re all going to go deaf. NASA told Quartz that it’s already had some “pretty outstanding success” in past attempts to reduce the sound of supersonic booms.

Then there’s the running costs issue. The Concorde was a loss-leader for Air France (one of only two carriers that regularly flew the plane), but it was built by a French company and was regarded as a symbol of national pride. In an era when airlines are trying to cram more peopleonto existing planes, modern commercial supersonic jets would need to be economically viable before any company is likely to purchase one.

NASA said that if all goes to plan with these studies, it sees the first business-jet-sized supersonic planes going into production by 2025, and commercial planes by 2030. For now, we’ll have to stick to spending inordinate amounts of time and fuel to fly anywhere.

Work anywhere with a wall, with a keyboard that's also a

projector

If you're short on space at home, the Sho U KiBoJet pico projector-keyboard combo can turn a blank wall into a monitor.

The KiBoJet keyboard comes with a built-in pico projector

TAIPEI -- Taiwanese company Sho U wants to show you its latest invention, the KiBoJet, a keyboard that cleverly features a built-in pico projector.

We've seen smart keyboards powered by software like Android, such as theOneBoard, but KiBoJet just runs a basic video and picture player. Before you turn your nose up, you can plug in a computer via its HDMI port and get the full-fledged desktop experience. The model above is running Windows 10 via the tiny Intel Compute Stick.

The KiBoJet's pico projector offers 150 lumens of brightness, which should be visible under most indoor lighting. It has a full-HD resolution, and is capable of projecting an image of 21 inches wide up to 33 inches, though this spec is not yet finalized. I found the quality of the projection to be passable, but bear in mind this was a working prototype that Sho U rushed to get ready for the show, so the final product may be a lot better.

Other hardware bits include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, as well as built-in 3W speakers. One cool thing I noticed was that the keyboard was rocksteady. No matter how quick or forceful I was when pressing down on the keys, the image from the pico-projector didn't even twitch.

The KiboJet unit shown off here at Computex also came with Intel's Compute stick built-in for demo purposes. When the keyboard is finally released in the first half of next year, you'll need that or something similar if you want to use the KiboJet as a PC, or you could pick up a Miracast dongle and project your smartphone's screen through the keyboard.

Ant mega-colony takes over world

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

A queen and worker Argentine ant have many, many relatives

 The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society

Entomologists reveal the ant colony's true size

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles.

But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition.

The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony.

One big family

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.

The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.

"The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.

"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write.