Day: July 10, 2017

Aftermarket bicycle carriers from companies like Yakima and Thule are hugely popular with cyclists. Unless you have a large car or want to remove one or both wheels from your bike every time you take it somewhere, owning a bike rack is necessity. While

aftermarket

solutions work well, each style has drawbacks. It seems that

Ford

agrees, as a recent patent filing discovered by

Reilly Brennan and FPO

shows the automaker is at least investigating a build-in rack system.

There are three typical styles of bike racks, roof mounted, hitch mounted, and suction cup or vacuum mounted. Ford’s patent is most like the rear hitch mounted systems. Like the tailgate step that’s available on the

F-150

, the retractable bike rack is fully integrated into the vehicle. The patent images show a

Mustang

, which is great as traditional bike racks don’t always work well with

sports cars

.

Sloping roofs make top-mounted racks awkward and uneven while the low body, rear suspension and exhaust make tow hitches difficult to mount properly. The big benefit is never having to mount or remove the rails while not in use. Just slide the pieces back into the body. Roof-mounted racks can cause issues with height restrictions. Any non-permanent system also invites thieves, as this author can thoroughly attest to.

If this makes it to production, we hope it receives less unnecessary flak from the competition than the tailgate step. It seems like a simple and elegant solution that’s sure to appeal to cyclists everywhere.

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Jump, a new video game subscription service that works a bit like Spotify, was revealed today alongside a closed beta.

The service, which is focused on highly rated and award-winning indie games at launch, gives subscribers unlimited access to a curated library of games. The games load in Jump’s app in around a minute, depending on the size of the game and your internet connection, using technology that avoids the latency and quality issues of typical game streaming.

Jump will launch on Windows, Mac, and Linux with 60 games. More will be added periodically, and developers can submit games for consideration.

The closed beta runs from today, July 10, through July 24. You can sign up on Jump’s website. When it launches later this summer, subscriptions will start at $10 per month.

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I played a lot of make-believe as a child. I’d take my dad’s spare gun holster and draw guns made of air from it, or steal my sister’s cape, emblazoned with an S for her first name, and fly around like Superman. But you reach a point where making pew pew noises becomes gauche. So as an adult, if you want to play make…

Read more…

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The US definitely doesn’t have a monopoly on long-term simulations of living on another planet. Four university students in Beijing have begun a 200-day isolation experiment, Lunar Palace 365 (why not Lunar Palace 200?), where they’ll live solely on the resources they would have on the Moon or Mars. That means generating life-giving oxygen from plants, recycling urine to produce drinking water and otherwise making the most of limited supplies.

As with other tests, the bigger challenges may be psychological. The students will have daily tasks to keep them motivated, but they’ll still be living in a tiny space, cut off from friends and family, for the better part of a year. How will they cope with a The test will also show how they react to going without sunlight for a significant stretch of time, which could affect their physical and mental health.

This isn’t the longest such test, but it could be important for China. The country is determined to catch up to the space programs of the US and Russia, and that means being ready for extended stays on distant worlds. What China learns now could pay dividends if it’s ready to explore the Solar System right as its biggest rivals embark on their own manned explorations of the Solar System.

Source: Reuters

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There are a few reasons why you aren’t flying across the country in hypersonic aircraft, but the simplest of them is heat: when you travel at speeds over Mach 5, the ultra-high temperatures (around 3,600F to 5,400F) strip layers from metal. How do you protect a vehicle when even the toughest ceramic tiles can’t handle those conditions? A team of British and Chinese researchers might have the answer. They’ve engineered a carbide-based ceramic coating that’s about 12 times more effective than current ceramics, making hypersonic aircraft more realistic.

The trick was to rely on a different manufacturing technique, reactive melt infiltration, to give the coating a unique structure that’s both extremely strong and resistant to oxidization. The next-best conventional coating, zirconium carbide, can withstand heat but is prone to degrading.

Any commercial use of the coating is a long ways off, if just because the hypersonic vehicles themselves are still a distant prospect. If it works well in practice, though, those extreme speeds would be feasible without compromising safety, especially in the long term. You’d see hypersonic aircraft that could fly you to another side of the planet within a couple of hours, and spacecraft that could return to Earth without needing frequent ceramic tile inspections and replacements. In short, flights that were once extra-risky could become virtually commonplace.

Via: Reddit

Source: University of Manchester, Nature

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly Monday directly over the Great Red Spot, a swirling storm on Jupiter. Scientists are hoping to gain a better understanding of the storm and why it persists.

(Image credit: Karen Teramura with James O’Donoghue and Luke Moore/NASA)

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