Month: September 2021

Rolls-Royce, best known in aviation for its jet engines, has taken an all-electric airplane on its maiden voyage. The “Spirit of Innovation” completed a 15 minute flight, marking “the beginning of an intensive flight-testing phase in which we will be collecting valuable performance data on the aircraft’s electrical power and propulsion system,” the company announced. 

Rolls-Royce said the one-seat airplane has “the most power-dense battery pack every assembled for an aircraft.” The aircraft uses a 6,000 cell battery pack with a three-motor powertrain that currently delivers 400kW (500-plus horsepower), and Rolls-Royce said the aircraft will eventually achieve speeds of over 300 MPH. 

The flight comes about a year after the originally scheduled takeoff and about six months after taxi trials. Rolls-Royce is also developing an air taxi with manufacturer Tecnam, with the aim of delivering an “all-electric passenger aircraft for the commuter market,” according to the companies. It has previously teamed with Siemens and Airbus on another e-plane concept. 

Aircraft companies have been exploring electric airplanes for a number of years, as air travel and cargo accounts for an increasing amount of greenhouse gases. The World Wildlife Foundation has called it “currently the most carbon intensive activity an individual can make.” 

Weight is a much bigger problem for airplanes that it is for cars, however. Ford’s all-electric Lightning pickup weighs 1,800 pounds more than the gas-powered model, and offers a range that’s slightly under half. However, if you added 1,800 pounds to to a Cessna 206 Turbo Stationair, you’d exceed its useful load by 500 pounds before you even loaded passengers (or the pilot) — so it wouldn’t even get off the ground. 

The project was half funded by the Aerospace Technology Institute and UK government, with the aim of eventually creating all-electric passenger planes. “This is not only about breaking a world record; the advanced battery and propulsion technology developed for this programme has exciting applications for the Urban Air Mobility market and can help make ‘jet zero’ a reality,” said Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East.

This article by S. Dent originally appeared on Engadget.

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A team of engineers in the UK led by Ben Scott-Geddes had supercar backgrounds, Scott-Geddes having worked on the McLaren F1, BMW LMS racer, Caparo T1, and Ferrari SF90, his crew bearing similar go-fast résumés. Instead of making what they knew, however, they made a left turn and headed for the literal hills about 18 months ago. The mission for their new company, Fering, is “to develop a vehicle that could traverse the globe with a lighter impact.” Scott-Geddes was especially interested in a vehicle that could cross an unsupported 4,000-kilometer section of the Arctic through Canada and Russia. The result is the Fering Pioneer, a range-extended electric off-roader packed with novelties.

The least unusual aspect is the powertrain, centered around a twin bank of lithium titanium oxide batteries with a combined 20-kWh capacity. The battery chemistry isn’t as efficient as lithium-ion, but it’s better at holding a charge in extreme heat and cold, and more resistant to fire, impacts, and punctures. The small unit is good for about 50 miles of pure electric driving, but it’s kept charged by an 800-cc diesel range-extender engine taken from a Smart. That combo powers two electric motors, one on each axle, that put out a combined 443 pound-feet of torque. Top speed is about 80 miles per hour.

The aluminum tube chassis contains welded, bolted, and bonded joints supplemented by composites for strength. The Pioneer stands at 189 inches long, 79 inches wide, and 77 inches tall; that’s one inch shorter, a couple inches wider, and six inches taller than a Ford Transit Connect. The modular frame design means the door frames are identical front to rear and side to side, yet again improving ease of repair.

The compact stance makes the 22.5-inch wheels appear gargantuan, Fering choosing that size because it’s a standard for heavy trucks around the world, easily replaceable from Borneo to Bolivia. Those rims hang off 2:1 geared hubs that multiply torque and help create a whopping 31.5 inches of ground clearance. The chassis has been draped in a rugged, durable fabric akin to what’s used in hiking boots; it won’t dent, and it’s easy to repair and replace. 

The package is claimed to weigh 3,307 pounds dry, and is capable of carrying its weight again as payload. Fering says the Pioneer will climb a 60% grade and a 19.7-inch step, traverse a 50-degree slope, and ford 55 inches of water. Created to get to and come back from the most remote environments, the real USP is when the Pioneer’s fitted with an extended-range fuel tank. Figured to get an average of 50 miles per gallon, the big tank enables a 7,000-kilometer range, or 4,350 miles. 

The company targets entering production next year, the plan to produce 150 to 200 Pioneers per annum, and Fering’s already taken its first deposit for a rig to work in the Amazon. Starting price will be about £150,000 ($206,700 U.S.), but that can balloon to the size of any budget, Fering promising almost endless customization and upgrade possibilities.

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On the Florida coast, at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the SpaceX team is readying the historic Inspiration4 mission for liftoff. It will be the first all-private, all-civilian spaceflight into orbit. The four crew members—Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Chris Sembroski, and Hayley Arceneaux—have trained intensely for this day, although none of them are professional astronauts. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft has previously ferried NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but everyone aboard this flight is traveling as a guest of Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of  Shift4Payments, who paid for all four seats and played a part in selecting the other passengers through a series of contests. (You can read more about the selection process and the mission here.)

The Inspiration4 crew have a five-hour launch window that opens at 8:02 pm Eastern on Wednesday night. If the weather cooperates and all systems are go, the team will blast off on their Falcon 9 rocket, and in a little more than eight minutes, their space capsule will be propelled into orbit. They’ll fly about six times higher than Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos did during their edge-of-space jaunts earlier this summer, and stay in orbit for approximately three days.

As early as Saturday evening, the Dragon spacecraft will descend toward Earth and splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast, where a SpaceX team will be waiting for them, ready to take the new astronauts ashore.

How to Watch

SpaceX’s webcast of the launch will go live at about 4 pm Eastern time on Wednesday, September 15, about four hours before the launch window opens. SpaceX’s preview coverage will include features on the crew and their lead-up activities. You can stream it here on YouTube or on the SpaceX website.

Weather condition forecasts have recently been upgraded from 70 percent to 90 percent favorable, so a launch tonight seems likely. But if they have to scrub tonight’s attempt, they’ll try again tomorrow. Their backup five-hour launch window starts Thursday, September 16, at 8:05 pm Eastern.

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Even though I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was built on opinion, conjecture, or even hope, and therefore irrelevant to my work. That work is running a psychology lab focused on finding ways to improve the human condition, using the tools of science to develop techniques that can help people meet the challenges life throws at them. But in the 20 years since I began this work, I’ve realized that much of what psychologists and neuroscientists are finding about how to change people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors—how to support them when they grieve, how to help them be more ethical, how to let them find connection and happiness—echoes ideas and techniques that religions have been using for thousands of years.

Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek.

My lab has found, for example, that having people practice Buddhist meditation for a short time makes them kinder. After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain. Only 16 percent of those who didn’t meditate did the same. (In reality, the stranger was an actor we hired to use crutches and wear a removable foot cast while trying to find a seat in a crowded room.) Compassion wasn’t limited to strangers, though; it also applied to enemies. Another study showed that after three weeks of meditation, most people refrained from seeking revenge on someone who insulted them, unlike most of those who did not meditate. Once my team observed these profound impacts, we began looking for other linkages between our previous research and existing religious rituals.

Gratitude, for instance, is something we had studied closely, and a key element of many religious practices. Christians often say grace before a meal; Jews give thanks to God with the Modeh Ani prayer every day upon awakening. When we studied the act of giving thanks, even in a secular context, we found it made people more virtuous. In a study where people could get more money by lying about the results of a coin flip, the majority (53 percent) cheated. But that figure dropped dramatically for people who we first asked to count their blessings. Of these, only 27 percent chose to lie. We’ve also found that when feeling gratitude to a person, to fate, or to God, people become more helpful, more generous, and even more patient.

Even very subtle actions—like moving together in time—can exert a significant effect on the mind. We see synchrony in almost every religion the world over: Buddhists and Hindus often chant together in prayer; Christians and Muslims regularly kneel and stand in unison during worship; Jews often sway, or shuckle, when reciting prayers together. These actions belie a deep purpose: creating connection. To see how it works, we asked pairs of strangers to sit across a table from one another, put on headphones, and then tap a sensor on the table in front of them each time they heard a tone. For some of these pairs, the sequence of tones matched, meaning they’d be tapping their hands in unison. For others, they were random, meaning hand movements wouldn’t be synchronized. Afterward, we created a situation where one member of each pair got stuck doing a long and difficult task. Not only did those who had been moving their hands in unison report feeling more connection with and compassion for their partner who was now toiling away, 50 percent of them decided to lend the partner a hand—a big increase over the 18 percent who decided to help without having just moved in sync.

The combined effects of simple elements like these—ones that change how we feel, what we believe, and who we can depend on—accumulate over time. And when they’re embedded in religious practices, research has shown they can have protective properties of sorts. Regularly taking part in religious practices lessens anxiety and depression, increases physical health, and even reduces the risk of early death. These benefits don’t come simply from general social contact. There’s something specific to spiritual practices themselves.