Model Airplanes

Why are people using drones commercially?

The advantage to using a drone for business or for marketing is you can now have the ability to cost-effectively put a camera in the sky where before it was cost prohibitive to do that with a helicopter or an airplane. Now the ease of operation of obtaining video or a picture, which was not readily available to a business due to budgeting concerns, is now fairly common place.

What are some industries you work with that are using drones?

The ones currently using it — the ones I address, anyway — are businesses that are doing marketing and advertising. Also, construction progress where a manager or an owner doesn’t have to be on site every single day to see what’s happening at that build site.

Are more people using drones commercially, or is it mostly people using them for fun?

There are two categories of drone users, hobbyist and commercial. I think hobbyists occupy the lion’s share of the market … but the number of people just in Virginia who are professional FAA-certified pilots is astounding. And it’s going to grow year to year to year. Hobbyists certainly occupy the consumer part of drone sales right now, though.

How did you get into the drone business?

This was the perfect situation for me: a career in television broadcast and advertising, a lifelong hobby of flying model airplanes in national competitions, and the advent of being able to put a camera in the air. The three came together. The way it

Article source: http://www.roanoke.com/business/news/roanoke/q-a-bob-sowder-co-owner-sowder-group-marketing-and/article_2c856dba-d0a5-56ff-924a-822ed1488f8e.html

Duke biologist Alejandro Berrio creates larger-than-life insect sculptures. This wooden mantis was exhibited at the Art Science Gallery in Austin, Texas in 2013.

On a recent spring morning, biologist Alejandro Berrio took a break from running genetic analyses on a supercomputer to talk about an unusual passion: creating larger-than-life insect sculptures.

Berrio is a postdoctoral associate in professor Greg Wray’s lab at Duke. He’s also a woodcarver, having exhibited his shoebox-sized models of praying mantises, wasps, crickets and other creatures in museums and galleries in his hometown and in Austin, Texas, where his earned his Ph.D.

The Colombia-born scientist started carving wood in his early teens, when he got interested in model airplanes. He built them out of pieces of lightweight balsa wood that he bought in craft shops.

When he got to college at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, he joined an entomology lab. “One of my first introductions to science was watching insects in the lab and drawing them,” Berrio said. “One day I had an ‘aha’ moment and thought: I can make this. I can make an insect with wings the same way I used to make airplanes.”

Beetle carved by Duke biologist Alejandro Berrio.

His first carvings were of mosquitoes — the main insect in his lab — hand carved from soft balsa wood with an X-Acto knife.

Using photographs for reference, he would sketch the insects from different positions before he started carving.

He worked at his kitchen table, shaping the body from balsa

Article source: https://researchblog.duke.edu/2018/03/27/researcher-turns-wood-into-larger-than-life-insects/

In November, I spent a few hours in the man cave of billionaire Sergei Polonsky, one of several fake presidential candidates in the recent Russian elections. The man cave was actually a skybox, with 360-degree views of Moscow and model airplanes and a Burmese python and a banya and two yapping, Mexican hairless dogs, whom the billionaire called his babies, and a library of rare, pre-revolutionary books about sex and art and death, and an army of dudes—mostly twentysomething, bearded, trendy—who made lattes and posted stuff. Polonsky was being interviewed by another fake presidential candidate, Ksenia Sobchak, a former reality-television star who once starred in a show called The Blonde in Chocolate. (Sobchak’s campaign later posted the interview on her YouTube channel.) After the interview, I rode with Sobchak in the back of her Audi and asked her questions about Russia, Vladimir Putin, her favorite American president (Ronald Reagan), her favorite British prime minister (Margaret Thatcher), and her favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov. (Fyodor Dostoevsky polls well in Russia.) Eventually, I mentioned Donald Trump, and Sobchak, who will probably run for president again, in 2024, when Putin is term-limited, said, “In the end, believe me, there will be no friendship between Trump and Putin.” Sobchak knows Putin. Her father, Anatoly Sobchak, was the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg and Putin’s one-time mentor. Putin cried at her father’s funeral, and even though she’s critical of the Russian president, no one thinks she would have run against him

Article source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/trump-and-putin-tortured-terrifying-end

by DCMilitary.com

Article source: http://www.dcmilitary.com/tester/news/local/a-glance-back-celebrating-pax-river-s-years/article_b1a99852-25e1-53b0-9611-bf1b1c25a504.html