Teenager Builds Pedal-Powered Airplane

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech on September 1, 2009 at 6:42 pm


Photo: Jesse van Kuijk

Dutch teenager Jesse van Kuijk designed and built a crude but functional human-powered aircraft:

Dates pour out of him as he relates the history of human-powered flight. The year 1979 was another landmark: Another craft, dubbed the Gossamer Albatross, made a successful flight over the English Channel, flying over 35 kilometers in less than three hours. The Gossamer Albatross was flown by American Bryan Allen, who now works in California as a software engineer for the Mars exploration project. Van Kuijk contacted Allen and the two exchanged emails about van Kuijk’s dream of self-powered flight.

In 2006, with his calculations complete, van Kuijk began to collect building materials. For over three years he gathered extremely light balsa wood, polyurethane and the light, rip-resistant foil that would eventually line the craft’s 26-meter-wide (85 feet) wings. And then he built what he had designed….

And then suddenly, unbelievably, “the earth under my feet slipped away,” van Kuijk exclaimed afterwards. He was flying! Alone, under his own power and in the aircraft he had designed and built. His aircraft flew, he had always known it would. But he could barely believe he had actually managed to defeat gravity’s pull.

Link via Gizmodo

 
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7 “Flying” Animals

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animal on July 10, 2009 at 11:35 am


Birds, bugs, and bats propel themselves through the air with wings, but other animals also travel through the air by gliding, leaping, or parachuting. This mental_floss article takes a look at seven creatures you wouldn’t normally expect to fly, including frogs, fish, and snakes. Yes, snakes. Pictured is a mobula, a relative of the manta ray, leaping high above the ocean. Link

 
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Don't Worry Folks: That Flash Over Virginia Was Just ... Russian Rockets?!

Posted by Urbanist in Science & Tech, Weapons & War on March 31, 2009 at 2:00 pm

To be fair, the Russians aren’t attacking. In fact, the US military knew this was coming and expected it. Debris from launched spacecraft and rocketry regularly fall back into the atmosphere. Stilll, residents who didn’t know that might well have thought that the Russians were invading when they dialed 911. Things might have gone rather differently a few decades ago.

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world’s first two-time space tourist — to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.

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