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 –Â Cassini has taken the final plunge.
Aero3 –Â SpaceX has a very good sense of humor regarding their failures.
Aero4 –Â Hubble sees a lot of very strange things.
BioMed
Bio1 – Finally, fire ants are useful for something besides elaborate curses!
Bio2 –Â GMO cotton can avoid the need for dyes or other chemical treatments.
Bio3 –Â 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 –Â 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 –Â Using sound to test blood. Â Alleviates the need for a centrifuge. Â Could be done with a handheld device (tricoder, anyone?)
Energy
Enr1 –Â Wave turbines. Â Still not as good as tidal turbines, but still interesting.
Materials
Mat1 – Old, but relevant since Harvey.
Mat2 –Â A better way to fix potholes. Â (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 –Â Damn billionaires, funding the development of technology that can only benefit themselves… oh, wait.
Mat5 –Â 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 –Â Cargo ship voyage time lapse. Â 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. Â 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