One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constant vigilance to a relatively boring task with high stakes, which is not something humans are particularly well adapted for. Modern GPS equipment can […]
Sliding in an extra slice of cruise ship to lengthen it. (Credit: Silversea cruises) The number of people going on cruises keeps rising year over year, with the number passengers carried increasing from just over 3.7 million in 1990 to well over 28 million in 2023. This has meant an increasing demand for more and […]
[Michelle Hampson] reports in IEEE Spectrum that Chinese researchers may improve self-driving cars by mimicking how the human eye works. In some autonomous cars, two cameras use polarizing filters to help understand details about what the car sees. However, these filters can penalize the car’s vision in low light conditions. Humans, however, have excellent vision […]
What’s a dog to do if they want to do some accessible skateboarding? [Simone Giertz]’s three-legged pup, [Scraps], got the chance to try a LEGO Technic board for her thrills. This electric LEGO skateboard features six motors and paw pedals to let [Scraps] steer while [Giertz] remotely controls the speed of the board. While it’s […]
You know, it feels as though it’s getting more and more difficult to compete for Father of the Year around here. And [Jon Petter Skagmo] just laid down a new gauntlet — the incredibly overly-engineered kids car. While the original plan was to build the entire car from scratch, [Jon] eventually opted to use an […]
In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your car was a rolling computer complex? The electronic speedometer has been around for well over a century and, when […]
Since the very beginning, solid-propellants have been the cornerstone of amateur rocketry. From the little Estes rocket picked up from the toy store, to vehicles like the University of Southern California’s Traveler IV that (probably) crossed the Kármán line in 2019, a rapidly burning chunk of solid propellant is responsible for pushing them skyward. That’s […]
Although the designation ‘Air Force One’ is now commonly known to refer to the airplane used by the President of the United States, it wasn’t until Eisenhower that the US President would make significant use of a dedicated airplane. He would have a Lockheed VC-121A kitted out to act as his office as commander-in-chief. Called […]
Who among us hasn’t at some point thought of building a little vehicle, and better still, a little off-road vehicle for a few high-octane rough-terrain adventures. [Made in Poland] has, and there he is in a new video with a little off-road buggy. The video which we’ve paced below the break is quite long, and […]
Here in the United States, we’re lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to shiny new passenger rail, despite being leaders in previous centuries. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has just released a story map of how the US could close the gap (a little). The Corridor Identification and Development (CID) Program […]