Electric flight may someday be ready for takeoff. Nevertheless, NASA and Airbus are also looking into electric jets. Moreover, the best batteries today are lithium-ion, which have been known to catch fire. But there are hurdles: Wright is counting on battery technology improving at its current impressive pace, which might not happen. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that aircraft contribute 8 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted by America’s transportation. Electric jets would be cheaper as well as cleaner, since fuel is the single biggest expense for airlines. Short-haul flights make up 30 percent of the global market, a chunk valued at $26 billion. The Wright plane would carry 150 passengers on journeys of less than 300 miles-basically short hops like New York to Boston-using quickly swappable modular batteries that would permit multiple flights per day without recharging. GroseĬlockwise from top left: ©Collin Edington and Iris Lee/Koch Institute, MIT ©Spooky Pooka ©David LinsteadĪeronautical Engineering Volt from the BlueĮlectric cars are coming into their own-so why not electric airplanes? Why not, indeed, says Wright Electric, a Massachusetts-based start-up that wants to sell battery-powered aircraft within 10 years’ time. The artist, Spooky Pooka, suffers from Crohn’s and has created a haunting black-and-white depiction worthy of a gothic horror novel. It’s a computer-generated illustration of a skeleton whose bones are made of sticks-a reference to the weight loss and fragility resulting from flare-ups of the inflammatory digestive disorder. The overall winner is called “Stickman-the Vicissitudes of Crohn’s” (right). A polarized light micrograph of a section of cat skin, including its hairs, whiskers, and blood vessels, resembles a modern art painting (bottom left). It’s actually a clump of neural stem cells growing on synthetic gel, and the green wires are growing nerves. The skeleton of the organisation is essentially the same as it was ten years ago, but many new faces have come and gone.Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology.įor 20 years, the Wellcome Image Awards have offered what the Washington Post calls the “most eye-catching celebration of science, medicine, and life.” For instance, the winner of one of this year’s awards, bestowed by the Wellcome Trust, a British medical research charity, looks like a purple caterpillar sprouting a huge bush of green wires (top left).
She lost so much weight while she was ill that she became a skeleton. A frame that provides support to a building or other construction.(anatomy) The system that provides support to an organism, internal and made up of bones and cartilage in vertebrates, external in some other animals.Īt the foot of a pretty big pine, and involved in a green creeper, which had even partly lifted some of the smaller bones, a human skeleton lay, with a few shreds of clothing, on the ground.
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