Model Airplanes

This article is featured in the Sept. 28 issue of the Magazine.

LAST FALL, in an open field outside Bridgeville, Delaware, Brian Labrie pushed a big red button and sent a pumpkin flying from a cannon faster than the speed of sound.

It was a special pumpkin: a thick-walled hybrid species from a farm in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the most aerodynamic out of thousands of candidates. And it was a special cannon, too: a huge fire-engine-red air tank with a 60-foot aluminum barrel that would resemble a screwdriver, if screwdrivers came in 6-ton models. But the most exceptional thing of all that November day may have been Brian Labrie, the guy who made it all happen.

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A bulky 41-year-old whose sunglasses have etched a tan line on his goateed face, Labrie owns B.H. Labrie Landscaping in Merrimack, New Hampshire. That’s his day job. Firing small pumpkins across very great distances — well, that’s his obsession.

Over the last few years, Labrie has assembled a crack team of experts in ballistics, engineering, meteorology, horticulture, and other disciplines. They’ve spent nearly 3,000 hours and a small fortune building American Chunker, perhaps the finest pumpkin-firing air cannon the world has ever seen. It’s sole purpose: to destroy the competition.

On that 2013 day in Delaware, Team American Chunker finally had its best chance. It was the World Championship Punkin Chunkin competition, an annual three-day event in which more than 100 teams of backyard tinkerers vie for a

Article source: http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/09/26/the-crazy-quest-punkin-chunkin-world-champion/YluLGlCkn0kFUlIpPtG7yJ/story.html

Before there was Beats, there was Bose. The QuietComfort line is the original über-popular headphone line, even if it’s aimed more at business travelers than teenagers and celebrities. The latest addition to Bose’s lineup looks similar to previous models, but the QuietComfort 25 has some new design flourishes here and there. At $299.95, it offers notable improvements—namely, the ability to use the headphones in passive mode. The QC 25’s sound signature is heavily sculpted, with a focus on bright highs and rich lows, so it’s probably not for purists seeking flat response. But if it’s top-shelf noise cancellation you’re after, it’s hard to beat this over-ear headphone pair. The QuietComfort 25 easily earns our Editors’ Choice award for noise-canceling headphones.

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Design
While the incredibly comfortable QC 25 retains the overall look and feel of it predecessors, there are design updates that seem to acknowledge that a simple black-and-metallic design no longer cuts it in the current headphone market. There’s now a white-and-tan color option in addition to the more standard black-and-gray model. If that’s not enough for you, you can customize your headphones for $100 extra and give them a variety of wild color combinations. It’s a decidedly un-Bose move, and speaks to the influence Beats has had on headphone design.

The headband is covered by canvas-like cloth on the top, with

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2468872,00.asp

Boeing Co. and aviation regulators have agreed on mandatory replacement of certain foamlike blocks inside the structures of more than 80 of the company’s 787 Dreamliner jets to ensure fire-suppression systems will work properly in case of an emergency.

A safety directive issued by the Federal Aviation Administration this week calls for replacement of missing or misaligned parts, called plugs, to prevent firefighting chemicals from dispersing too quickly in case of a blaze in lower cargo compartments. The agency said…

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/boeing-agrees-to-fire-suppression-fix-on-some-787-dreamliners-1411688689

It was a small victory in a grim,
relentless, and runaway catastrophe.

In July, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, both American
medical workers in Liberia, had become stricken with Ebola
hemorrhagic fever after treating dozens suffering from a disease
with a mortality rate between 50 and 90 percent. They were
rushed doses of an experimental cocktail of Ebola antibodies
called ZMapp, flown home on a Gulfstream III on separate flights
on Aug. 2 and 5, and isolated inside a special tent called an
aeromedical biological containment system.

The U.S. State Department and the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) coordinated the flights, operated
by Phoenix Air, a private transport company based in Georgia.
Cared for in a special ward at Emory University in Atlanta, they
recovered within the month and later met with President Obama.
It appeared a win for the White House.

Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the San Diego company that
developed ZMapp, is also in a way a White House project. It’s
supported exclusively through federal grants and contracts that
go back to 2005. The antibody mixture hadn’t yet passed its
first phase of human clinical trials, but after the two
Americans were infected with Ebola, the Food and Drug
Administration granted emergency access to ZMapp.

Limited Doses

It’s impossible to say whether ZMapp was vital to the
survival of Brantly and Writebol. There were a limited number of
doses available. Mapp ran out after giving doses to the two
Americans, a Spanish priest, and to

Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/doctors-survive-ebola-with-drugs-delayed-by-bureaucracy.html