Trying to understand someone who doesn’t speak your language could be a thing of the past, thanks to this new piece of technology.
Pilot earphones act like much like Babel Fish in ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ – they let two people who speak a different language understand each other.
The gadget will launch to translate between English, French, Spanish and Italian in Autumn of this year.
via HypeBeast.com: Boom is a relatively new start up that is trying to make supersonic travel a reality. Supersonic to the tune of 2.6x the speed of sound. This would mean trips from New York to London would be possible in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5.
While the company is still working on their first prototype, they have a lot of experienced employees who know what they’re doing. The 11-person team has collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts working on things such as the autopilot system on the 787, fighter plane engines, and flight dynamics on Spaceship Two. A roster of ex-NASA, ex-Boeing and ex-Lockheed doesn’t sound too bad. They hope to get their first prototype in the air late next year.
Even more exciting though, is the big name that just signed on to help. Virgin Group has optioned ten planes in a deal valued at about $2 billion dollars — if everything goes to plan. Boom has also optioned 15 additional planes to a European carrier, bringing the total value of the optioned planes to $5 billion.
Virgin is also helping Boom in its development, with a Virgin spokesperson saying, ““We can confirm that The Spaceship Company will provide engineering, design and manufacturing services, flight tests and operations and that we have an option on the first 10 airframes. It is still early days and just the start of what you’ll hear about our shared ambitions and efforts.”
Learn more about the company and its developments on its website.
France is joining the Netherlands and Korea in the solar road club. The French government plans 620 miles of energy-generating pavement, which will be able to provide power for up to 8% of the country’s population.
Construction will take place over the next five years, using Wattway panels from Colas. These quarter-inch thick panels are glued straight onto the roadway, and act much like regular road—they’re strong enough for trucks, and drivers won’t easily skid when they brake while driving on them. The panels, says the manufacturer, require about 215-square-feet of surface area to generate enough electricity to power a home. That means about 0.6 miles of paved road should be enough to supply a town of 5,000 people.
Roads seem to be the perfect spot for solar power. Roads already ugly, so it’s hard to make them look worse; they’re usually not covered, so they get plenty of light; and roads are the very definition of infrastructure, so there’s no problem hooking them up to the electric grid. Provided the panels can hold up to heavy traffic, it should be an interesting experiment.