FORCE FIELD BOUNCES BUGS
A curtain of fast-flowing air can prevent insect stowaways from boarding an aircraft with the passengers. The barrier is created by blasting air at 1 metre per second from two portable ventilators mounted either side of the cabin doorway.
People can walk through the barrier but insects, which might carry diseases such as malaria or West Nile virus to other countries, can鈥檛 fly through. Tests carried out at the US Agricultural Research Service鈥檚 Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology in Florida, where the system was developed, have shown it to be 99 per cent effective at blocking flies and mosquitoes.
Advertisement
STUDS TO GET SMARTER
Can glowing road studs alert drivers to danger by shining more brightly when there is an accident or fog ahead? In the first trial of its kind, hundreds of the LED-based studs have been fixed along the edge of a carriageway on the M8 motorway in Scotland.
The smart studs, developed by Astucia of West Malling, Kent, are connected by buried cable to a roadside controller, which measures the speed of passing cars as they block light reaching a sensor in each stud. If traffic speeds slow dramatically, the controller assumes there is a hazard ahead and switches on the LEDs to warn approaching drivers. Their impact on road safety will be assessed later this year.
PENTAGON鈥橲 ROBOTS IN A SPIN
A robotic vehicle race across the Mojave desert ended in disappointment last weekend with all 15 entrants failing to reach the finish line (New 杏吧原创, 13 March, p 26). The favourite, Carnegie Mellon University鈥檚 Humvee-based Sandstorm, veered off a mountainous dirt track just 11 kilometres along the 230-kilometre route and was only saved from plunging down a cliff when its undercarriage got stuck. But it travelled further than any robot vehicle so far, and was the first to travel at 40 kilometres per hour.
The rest of the field 鈥� including a robot truck and the first autonomous motorcycle 鈥� ran into trouble even earlier. Seven refused to leave the starting line, with one flipping upside down and another zooming round in circles. The race was organised by the Pentagon to foster research into autonomous military vehicles.
