Fly by wireless

An unmanned “fly-by-wireless” has been test-flown by a group of Portuguese engineers (see New Scientist - 'Fly-by-wireless' plane takes to the air). The group claimed that this approach reduces weight of cables and power requirements. Also, if the system does not have the cables then it is much more flexible to changes. I think just making it work is not technically hard. Personally I am more interested in the combination among fly-by-wireless, distributed control, and aerodynamics. Imaging one day the missions of a traditional military aircraft will be replaced by a cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Each UAV is a module for, say, ground attack, surveillance etc. The combination of module is mission-dependent. They fly in a formation that is adaptive to the condition, and the cluster is controlled as a whole. Dunno if commercial airplanes will adapt this idea. I bet al-Qaeda will welcome this, so they can hijack a plane using a laptop, or even remotely.

Looking for aliens on the Moon?

New Scientists is running the report: "Looking for aliens on the Moon",an idea that might sound crazy at first. Can we find a black monolith like the one in 2001, A Space Odyssey? Maybe not, but small alien objects would survive the long journey better than radio signals, as suggested in the 2004 Nature article “Inscribed matter as an energy-efficient means of communication with an extraterrestrial civilization”. The moon is a logical place to look for these alien objects because there is no atmosphere to destroy or denature them. The problem is: we need to send a lot, a lot of robotic microscopes and spectrometer to the Moon. (Image: the discovery of monolith from Movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, credit: TheFreeDictionary.com.)

Asteroid impact scenario

Sometimes I feel my research doesn't have high impact. It is absolutely true comparing with this report on asteroid impact: Asteroid impact scenario. A big asteroid might kill more people if it hits sea than land. The death toll due to an asteroid-resulted tsunami could easily outrun the 2004 South Asia tsunami. There are simulated impact animations for reference. A 300-m asteroid can create a water cavity of ~8 km diameter, 3 km depth depending on impact location. They estimate such impacts happen much frequent than I thought, every 5880 years, suspiciously just longer than our written history. BTW, Santa Cruz is a great place to study big waves.

When Things Get Small

I will remind myself to watch the 30-minute video When Things Get Small from UCSD for the next School of Engineering Open House. Making small magnets is not a popular science for everyone, but the video makes some good analogies on scaling, and successfully kept my 6-year-old son watching for half an hour.