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Spectrum's monthly slideshow proves that a picture is worth a thousand bytes

20 Oct 2009

Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

BLOWN AWAY: British engineer Richard Jenkins poses with the “very high performance sailboat” he drove into the record books earlier this year. The 600-kilogram carbon-fiber-composite craft broke the land speed record for wind-powered vehicles when it topped out at nearly 203 kilometers per hour (126 miles per hour). Small wing attachments keep the ultralight vehicle from taking flight when it nears top speed. <
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Photo: Carl Morgan

ANDROID ATHLETE: Joules, the pedaling robot pictured with its designer, Carl Morgan [right], and his son, a former professional bicyclist, will generate 3 kilowatts of power—no match for Lance Armstrong, but enough to relieve the tandem bike’s helmsman of pedaling duties. Joules’s leg power comes from a pancake-style permanent magnet dc motor in its torso, which draws current from a pair of 48-volt, 15-ampere-hour lithium-ion batteries mounted to the bike’s frame. <
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Photo: Mitsubishi

LARGER THAN LIFE: Each of the two 49- by 22-meter screens suspended above the football field at the brand new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, comprises more than 10.5 million LEDs that together draw 635 kilowatts. Because there are four LEDs (two red, one blue, and one green) in each pixel, the 2176-by-4864 arrays provide the same image resolution as your 1080p hi-def TV at home—but the players running across your screen are probably not seven stories tall. <
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Photo: Project Icarus

TRY THIS AT HOME: Want to take your own pictures of Earth from the edge of the great beyond? Three MIT students launched a helium balloon—shown here during its 40-minute descent—equipped with a GPS tracker and a digital camera that captured a record of the journey from more than 28 km in the air. What’s the big deal? They did it on a budget of $150 and have created a detailed DIY guide so you can follow suit. <
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Photo: Robert Q. Riley Enterprises

IF YOU WANT SOMETHING DONE RIGHT: Can you put together a more fuel-efficient car than the automakers have? An automotive designer has developed a kit for a three-wheeled plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with a 64-km all-electric range. The XR3, which can cost up to US $25 000 to build, boasts fuel economy exceeding 1.18 liters per 100 kilometers (200 miles per gallon) when running its diesel engine and electric motor in hybrid mode. <
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Image: Argonne National Laboratory

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION: To visualize complex phenomena, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory once relied on powerful graphics processors to generate images like this one of a supernova. But transferring the data from their IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer proved to be a huge bottleneck. The researchers decided to try letting Blue Gene/P render images while it processes the quadrillions of data points it has to handle anyway. <
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Photo: Olivier Maire/Keystone/AP Photo

GREEN MOUNTAIN: If you could rotate this picture 360 degrees, what you wouldn’t see in the breathtaking panorama in the Swiss Alps are electric power lines. That’s why the two guys in the foreground, architecture professors at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, designed this futuristic building, called Monte Rosa, to be 90 percent energy independent. Photovoltaic panels and solar thermal systems provide light, heat, and hot water. <
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Photo: Columbia Artists Management Inc./CAMI Music
FRODO UNPLUGGED: On 9 and 10 October, the ancient world of the Shire and modern-day Earth met when the first episode of the three-part Lord of the Rings film saga was screened at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. The entire musical score was performed live by a Swiss orchestra and two local choirs. <
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Image: ESO/S
STARRY NIGHT: Talk about high definition! This image of the 100-light-year-wide Lagoon Nebula was taken by European Southern Observatory researchers using a 370-million-pixel camera attached to a 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The Wide Field Imager camera brought the star-studded interstellar cloud into focus from 5000 light-years away. <
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supercomputer ibm supernova type:slideshow astrophysics hardware

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