Top TechTop Tech #49: Transparent Armor, Blue Origin launches, Strong Micro-Robots
Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise.
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Navy creates transparent armor
• Blue Origin: first successful rocket launch
• Micro-Robots Pull 2,000 X Their Weight
Navy creates transparent armor
“Imagine a glass window that’s tough like armor, a camera lens that doesn’t get scratched in a sand storm, or a smart phone that doesn’t break when dropped. Except it’s not glass,” says the U.S. Navy’s news release. “It’s a special ceramic called spinel.”
For ten years, researchers with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory worked with the durable magnesium aluminate mineral. “For weight-sensitive platforms— unmanned autonomous vehicles, head-mounted face shields—it’s a game-changing technology,” the scientists say.
Blue Origin: first successful rocket launch
Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reports its first successful launch.
“Today we flew the first developmental test flight of our New Shepard space vehicle,” the company says. “Our 110,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine worked flawlessly, powering New Shepard through Mach 3 to its planned test altitude of 307,000 feet.”
Also, the in-space separation of the crew capsule from the propulsion module “was perfect,” Blue Origin adds. “Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return.”
Micro-Robots Pull 2,000 X Their Weight
A new type of small robot that can apply orders of magnitude more force than it weighs, report engineers at Stanford University.
Thanks to controllable adhesive technology, a 12-gram robot pulls 2 thousand times its weight. “This is the equivalent of a human adult dragging a blue whale around on land,” the researcher add.
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