Model Airplanes

Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.

That’s Illan Kramer’s (ECE) hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” said Kramer, a postdoctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical Computer Engineering at the Univ. of Toronto and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre.

Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. A surface the size of your car’s roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-W light bulbs—or 24 compact fluorescents.

He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.

Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing—an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two

Article source: http://www.rdmag.com/videos/2014/12/technique-offers-spray-solar-power

Depending on where you are in the world, Taco Bell can be as many as 2 miles away. Fortunately the chain has started selling make-at-home kits, and today we’re trying the Dessert Nacho Kit. It’s a great chance to make your own cuisine, and you can keep the box around to help you stop spelling “dessert” like “desert” all the time.

Miles: It’s a little disconcerting that the box has two expiration dates, one for the product, and one for the person eating it.

Ian: Yeah, a dessert kit is fun and all, but I’m one unit of motivation away from just eating each of the separate parts straight out of the box.

Eva: This is much better than the model airplane kit I tried to eat last Monday.

Ian: I got an ice cream headache. Usually when I eat Taco Bell this fast, all I get is the respect of my peers.

Eva: Why is there an Allen wrench in my nachos?

Mike: All that’s missing is some Magic Shell salsa.

Robert: It’s tasty. But until it comes with fluorescent yellow ice cream that glorps out of a pump, it won’t be a complete nacho experience.

Kelsie: With winter approaching, make sure you have plenty of emergency dessert nacho kits in your car.

Eva: How is this a kit? Nachos are a food you make because you don’t want to actually assemble anything.

Robert: Oh, the box says it contains 5 servings. Sorry guys, I’ll go get some more

Article source: http://wuwm.com/post/sandwich-monday-taco-bell-dessert-nachos

The pickup truck speeds down the runway of the airfield here on the Eastern Shore, a small, unmanned aircraft in its payload. And then the aircraft takes flight, banking over the heads of the spectators.

After years of planning, the University of Maryland’s drone test facility is open for business.

Unmanned aircraft systems are most familiar to Americans for their use in war to scout, spy and kill. Privacy groups have watched warily as law enforcement has started to experiment with them.

But there is a growing interest among businesses eager to employ them to deliver goods, monitor agriculture and measure environmental conditions, among other applications, and the Federal Aviation Administration is encouraging research into how they might safely be introduced into U.S. airspace.