Category: News

Skylifter is an Australian start-up company that hopes to use enormous blimps to move pieces of equipment to places not easily accessible by roads:

Heavy-transport helicopters, such as the Mil Mi-26 or Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane, address some of these difficulties, but their payloads are limited to 20 and nine tonnes, respectively, and the huge rotors create a powerful downdraft that makes handling that payload rather tricky. So people have long been looking for other ways round the problem. Now, Skylifter, an Australian aeronautical firm, thinks it has found the perfect solution.

The company is developing a piloted dirigible capable of carrying loads of up to 150 tonnes over distances as great as 2,000km (1,240 miles) at a speed of 45 knots (83kph). This would permit the craft to transport not just hefty components, but entire buildings, to remote areas. The company envisages modules ranging from rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to luxury airborne cruise ships.

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It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing.

SB 1449 was written by state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), who said it will keep marijuana-related cases from going to court-clogging jury trials, although the penalty would remain a fine of up to $100 but no jail time.

Energy efficiency has only recently become a popular concern among vehicle owners, but some people have been thinking about it for a long, long time. Craig Henderson and Bill Green designed the Avion, a fuel-efficient sports car, in 1984. Two years later, the vehicle set the Guinness World Record for fuel economy, getting an average of 103.7 mpg all the way from the Mexico border to the British Columbia, Canada, border. Now Henderson has revived the Avion for another jaunt from Canada to Mexico.

The number of times you’ve been caught out and about without a bar of gold is set to be a distant memory—at least for Florida and Las Vegas residents, who’ll see hundreds of these ATMs installed next year.

The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi was the first place to install cash machines that hand out 10-gram bars of 24-carat gold in exchange for money, but in true American fashion similar machines will be situated on each side of the coast from next year.