*This Editor’s Note will appear in the January/February Edition of WDD. Human beings are obsessed with the future. As it relates to this space, engineers need look no further than this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which brimmed with concepts and technologies that promised to endure past mere trend and make life eternally easier for…
When Engineers Calculate Christmas (Spoiler Alert: It Doesn’t End Well for Santa)
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the existence of Santa Claus is highly improbable. But the reason is math, not myth. Read on as an engineer breaks down the numbers (and ruins Christmas for all of us). Children The number of kiddos (excluding those of the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist religions)…
Molex, TE Announce Alliance to Deliver Interoperable, High-Speed Tech
Recently, Molex and TE Connectivity announced a collaboration to launch and promote the next generation of connectors and cable assemblies. These will meet the requirements of new data storage, servers, routers, and other high-speed applications. What follows is a Q&A between WDD and Molex and TE Connectivity regarding this exciting agreement—a shining example of the…
Amazon Conducts First Commercial Drone Delivery
Sure, we all wondered if Amazon’s foray into drone delivery would fall to the wayside, following the e-commerce giant’s recently unveiled grab-now-pay-later, machine learning-based grocery stores (read about Amazon Go here). But the company has other plans—and milestones to make. On December 7th, Amazon made its first Prime Air drone delivery—a Fire TV device and…
DOT Proposal Requires V2V Tech in All New Cars
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a proposed rule, requiring the inclusion of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology in new cars. This Notice of Proposed Rulemaking would enable a “multitude of new crash-avoidance systems that, once fully deployed, could prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes every year,” according to a statement. V2V technology utilizes dedicated…
3D-Printed Dog Nose Improves Chemical Detection Devices
Warning: adorable, fluffy pups lie ahead. (And some science too, I swear.) Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 3D-printed an anatomical replica of a dog’s nose, creating a sensor that sheds light on why our cute canine companions have unparalleled sniffers—particularly, why dogs’ ability to sense vapors enables them to detect everything…
100 Years Hence: By Now We Should Have Autonomous Sidewalks, X-Ray Vision, and More
**Editor’s note: As this year draws to a close, feel free to email your own “One Hundred Year Hence” (or at least 2017) future predictions to [email protected] for the chance to be featured on WDD. At the turn of the twentieth century, America was experiencing a technological boom. Brought on by the second Industrial…
Amazon Go: A ‘Self-Driving’ Grocery Store With No Lines or Registers
No lines, no cashiers, no embarrassing self-checkout registers that remind us we clearly aren’t qualified to scan a simple bag of frozen peas. That’s the vision for Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant’s new, 1,800 square-foot retail space located in Seattle, Washington. Patrons simply grab what they want, and Amazon charges their accounts later. The system works…
Optical Clock Tested in Space, Paves Way for Increased GPS Precision
Devices that utilize GPS (your smartphone, for example) calculate your location by communicating with at least four satellites. Each of these bears atomic clocks that provide a timestamp, thereby calculating where you are, give or take a few meters, based on the relative differences between those times. Now, researchers have sent an optical clock into…
Google Earth Timelapse: Watch 30 Years of Planetary Change in Seconds
In 2013, Google launched Timelapse, a project that utilizes satellite images to show us how much the world has changed over the past three decades. In its inaugural year, Timelapse drew attention to urban development in Las Vegas and Dubai, as well as the slow death of Alaska’s Columbia glacier. This year, the video, featuring…
France is Building a Human-Powered Gym Boat – and Other Around-the-World Tech Stories You Might Have Missed
Canada is Testing its First Autonomous RV Our Neighbors up North have finally entered the race to develop self-driving cars. The decade-long project, costing almost $3 million, involves three vehicles: a Lincoln MKZ hybrid sedan (adorably dubbed, “Autonomoose”), developed by the University of Waterloo; a 2017 Lincoln, developed by software company, BlackBerry QNX; and a…
Safe to Say: It’s All About the Safety
*This Editor’s Note will appear in the November/December Edition of WDD. It’s an all-too-familiar scenario. We’re at the grocery store, a party, the beach (wishful thinking, of course, since winter is nearly upon us). We glance down at our phones, having regrettably been separated from a wall outlet for a few hours, when we see the…
Watch: How to Use Your Drone to Cook Thanksgiving Dinner
Cooking with your hands is so passé. Autel Robotics, which specializes in drone and aerial photography solutions, has created a delectably entertaining video, in which an X-Star Premium Drone is used to prepare an entire Thanksgiving meal. Need to peel the potatoes or chop up the carrots? Use the aircraft’s four rotating propellers. Remove the…
SpaceX Seeks Approval for Massive Satellite Network to Create Global Internet Service
SpaceX has recently filed documents with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), requesting permission to operate a giant satellite network that will provide the world with high-speed Internet—functioning as an alternative to Earth-bound cables and fiber-optics. Billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk first announced the project back in January 2015. It consists of 4,425…
Pie in the Sky: Drones Are Delivering Pizza in New Zealand
While the idea of a pizza delivery drone has been talked about for quite some time, Domino’s Pizza has finally made the leap. The chain announced that it made its first commercial delivery in New Zealand on Wednesday, a venture that had the approval of the country’s civil aviation authority. The global pizza chain partnered…
DARPA ‘Scavenger Hunt’ Tests 1,000 Radiation Sensors at National Mall
DARPA recently organized a city-wide scavenger hunt to test its SIGMA program, which aims to develop networked sensors that can detect radiation in large, urban areas—thus preventing possible terrorist attacks involving the use of radiological or nuclear materials. During the test, several hundred volunteers, each one carrying a smartphone-sized radiation detector in a backpack, walked…
‘I Voted From Space’: American Astronaut Casts Ballot From ISS
This morning, I barely even stepped through the office doors when I spied a handful of people already shuffling in with their “I Voted” stickers plastered proudly to the fronts of their coats. Today, on this historic Election Day, throngs of people across the country will be exercising their Constitutional right to vote. Most of…
Watch This Drone Hack Smart Light Bulbs (and What It Means for IoT Security)
Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science have published a paper that outlines a rather unsettling (though perhaps unsurprising) scenario involving the “hackability” of internet-connected devices located in close proximity to each other. Utilizing a flaw in the ZigBee radio protocol, which is used in thousands of consumer devices, the researchers demonstrate the explosive ease…
This is What Happens When Rocket Scientists Carve Pumpkins
Is carving pumpkins rocket science? I’d say so. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab recently convened the agency’s annual pumpkin carving contest, which yielded an impressive array of entries that light up, spin, integrate all manner of moving parts, and yes—even provide shrewd political commentary. Some pay homage to classic, interstellar movies, like Star Wars,…
It’s That Time of Year Again: Drones Are Being Used to Pull Epic Halloween Pranks
Last year, I pulled together a few videos that demonstrate some of the creative ways drones are being used to pull Halloween pranks on unsuspecting passersby—including decking out the aircraft in all manner of ghoulish attire. Well, it’s that time of year again. Fifty-year-old Michael Irvine, from Peshtigo, Wisconsin, recently decided to prank his daughters…
London Calling! UK Kiosks Will Replace Public Payphones, Offer Free Gigabit Internet.
Soon, Londoners will be able to access free WiFi, making The Old Smoke the second city (following New York earlier this year) to transform its old, abandoned payphones into high-speed Internet hotspots. The service, dubbed LinkUK, is the result of a partnership between communications services company, BT, municipal media company, Intersection (also the force behind…
Giving Alexa Wings: Amazon Wins Patent for Personal Drone Assistant
Amazon was recently awarded a patent for a voice-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle assistant, which the e-commerce giant envisions will be “smaller, lighter, and less expensive than conventional UAVs.” The aircraft would come in handy for a range of applications, such as enhancing support for police and locating lost objects. “The UAV can act as eyes and/or…
Watch Drones Organize Themselves in Mesmerizing Aerial Dance
Dubbed one of 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, University of California’s Nora Ayanian studies robot coordination. Programming machines to better cooperate with each other has implications for a range of industries, including home automation, environmental monitoring, manufacturing, and the military. Take drones, for example. A farmer who wanted to deploy aircraft to survey…
Watch This Eerie 1,000 Watt LED-Powered Drone Light Up the Night Sky
Fact: there is a direct correlation between the number of amateur drone pilots and the number of amateur engineers—and they all find a home on YouTube. YouTuber rctestflight attached a 1,000 Watt LED light bar to the underside of a Freefly Alta 8 drone, and the resulting video of the aircraft, as it casts light…
How a Drone and a Twist of Fate Saved a Man (and His Dog) During Hurricane Matthew
It’s been a long week, dear readers, but this story is sure to put a smile on your face. Last Saturday, October 8th, the night Hurricane Matthew made landfall, Hope Mills, North Carolina-resident Chris Williams awoke to the sound of his kitchen door flying open: water gushed in as if someone had opened a fire…