Aerospace
Aero1 – Imagine if the pilot on your next commercial flight said, “We are beginning our descent into …”, and three and half minutes later, you were on the ground.
Aero2 – Cassini has taken the final plunge.
Aero3 – SpaceX has a very good sense of humor regarding their failures.
Aero4 – Hubble sees a lot of very strange things.
BioMed
Bio1 – Finally, fire ants are useful for something besides elaborate curses!
Bio2 – GMO cotton can avoid the need for dyes or other chemical treatments.
Bio3 – There are no pills that magically melt away fat, but there is a patch (and it doesn’t magically melt away fat, you still gotta cut your intake and exercise to burn it off).
Bio4 – It has been suggested that the reason we die of old age is because we are so very good at making babies, or something like that.
Bio5 – Using polio to kill cancer. The enemy of my enemy…
Bio6 – Using sound to test blood. Alleviates the need for a centrifuge. Could be done with a handheld device (tricoder, anyone?)
Energy
Enr1 – Wave turbines. Still not as good as tidal turbines, but still interesting.
Materials
Mat1 – Old, but relevant since Harvey.
Mat2 – A better way to fix potholes. (also old, but first I’ve heard of it)
Mat3 – I know this is something that will probably be very useful for various scientific optics and laser applications, but I bet somebody is going to use this to tint their car windows.
Mat4 – Damn billionaires, funding the development of technology that can only benefit themselves… oh, wait.
Mat5 – 3D Printing a rocket engine from two alloys.
Military
Mil1 – This is possibly the smartest thing the Navy has done in a while.
Mil2 – Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!
Transportation
Trans1 – Cargo ship voyage time lapse. This is a fascinating video to watch.
Weird, Wacky, And Wonderful
WWW1 – Back when “Your Momma carries a Skeggöx !” wasn’t much of an insult.
WWW2 – The EFF is suing CBP over device searches at the border. IIRC the courts haven’t exactly been siding against CBP on this.
WWW3 – This guy wasn’t in Jurassic Park.
[Bio4] interests me because that was being floated as a hypothesis back at the tail end of last century when I was an undergrad. Which means folks have been chasing this evidence (or any evidence to support the hypothesis at a macro-organism level) for a long time. Sweet.Report
Bio6: The micro-fabrication techniques developed originally for large-scale integrated circuits are turning out to be rather widely useful.Report
Mil1- note that while COTS*, an Xbox 360 controller is obsolete technology. The question is whether this RCI** is forward compatible with, say, Xbox One controllers, or will submarine SKs need to get Ebay accounts.
*Commercial Off the Shelf
**Rapid COTS Insertion, an acronym within an acronym, most famously used in sonar, ARCI, (or A-RCI), for Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion.Report
Well, the smart part was using a game controller all the new kids are already trained to use. Game controllers are all pretty standard on the interface front (pin arrangements differ, but figuring out what pin/signal responds to which control point is trivial – High school kids do it when building their robots for FIRST), so switching to a new controller should take the boat ET3 all of about 10 minutes.Report
Ah, but are they trained using a regular Y axis or an inverted Y axis?Report