COW TANK: How do you hide a tank? You make it look like a cow. Yes, really. In infrared anyway. BAE Systems Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to become invisible by mimicking the temperature of their surroundings or to appear to be a different object. Hexagonal panels of a material that can change temperature very quickly cover the tank. On-board thermal cameras register the temperature of the environment and alter the temperature of the panels so as to blend in or to project a false image. Your eyes and your heat-sensitive cameras may deceive you. BBC. BBC has more, and there's video here.
AIR LIFT: The US Airforce issued a public challenge for someone to create "The Vehicle Stopper" — a device to safely stop fleeing vehicles, such as small cars or trucks. Many people sent in ideas, but the winner was a mechanical engineer from Peru. His idea is a small remote electric-powered vehicle that can accelerate up to 200 Kph within 3 seconds. It positions itself beneath the fleeing vehicle and then triggers a restrained airbag to lift the car and slide it to a stop. Now the Airforce intend to build a prototype. Simple, once you've thought of it. Read what the White House has to say.
TELESCOPE TRUCK: You can't actually just plunk a telescope down on the top of a mountain and then leave it there to do its work unattended. It turns out telescopes need regular servicing. Until now the 105 tonne telescopes of the ALMA Array, 5 Km up in the Chilean mountains, have had to be loaded onto a truck and hauled down the mountain for routine servicing. That's no easy task and fraught with risk. So now ALMA has a new truck that can offer on-site service. The Front End Service Vehicle is 11 metres long, 2.4 metres wide and weighs 23 tonnes. The truck includes insulated walls, generators to cool equipment, air conditioning and air tanks to help compensate for the thin air at that altitude. Jobs you've never hear of: telescope service person. Network World has details.
FLOAT YOUR HOUSE: Instead of trying to hold back the waves the FLOATEC project aims to go with the flow. Dutch company Dura Vermeer is creating floating buildings. But while small buildings float fairly easily, large ones need special techniques. They create a floating grid of modules made of composite, concrete and expanded polystyrene. The grid is a container for concrete and forms the foundation of the building. I think I'll stay put on dry land. More at Eurkea Network.
CAN YOU HEAR ME?: The UK's Prospero satellite was launched in 1971 and it's still in orbit. It operated for 2 years, then was contacted regularly until 1996. Now University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory hope to re-establish communications. Contact codes were lost, but after much searching were found in the National Archives. Now engineers must rebuild suitable equipment and get permission to use the radio frequencies. It'll be a feat of astro-archaeology. It's crazy really that we just abandon satellites out there in orbit. Details at BBC.
