Brilliant Staircase Design Stores Extra Energy to Make It Easier to Climb Later. Do you deliberately avoid visiting friends who live in multi- story buildings without an elevator? No one would fault you—having to climb even just a single flight of stairs is like being forced to workout against your will. But thanks to engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory University, stairs might one day do all the hard work for you. In a paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE, that team details their energy- recycling stairs, which store energy when you descend, and then release it to make the ascent easier on the way back up. You probably don’t stop to think about it while you race down a flight of stairs, but your body expends a considerable amount of energy in the process to prevent you from falling. It’s usually wasted energy, but these energy- recycling stairs take advantage of those forces using a spring- loaded mechanism that compresses each step and locks it down as you descend. This leaves every step charged with potential energy once you’ve hit the bottom. When you go to climb back up, pressure sensors on each tread release the locking mechanism on the step below it, turning that stored potential energy into kinetic energy that helps lift a climber’s leg as the spring- powered step raises again. As the stairs compress on your descent, the engineers have calculated they save around 2. And on the way back up, the energy- recycling stairs make it around 3. The stair’s unique mechanisms can be retrofitted to existing steps, so the technology isn’t only for new buildings, necessarily. And installing them would be cheaper, and require less space, than an escalator or elevator. There’s no word on when this technology will be commercialized, but anyone living in an elevator- less building will certainly be hoping it’s as soon as possible.[Georgia Tech via New Atlas]. Apple's Self- Driving Car Is Now a Dinky Self- Driving Bus. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Apple’s once ambitious self- driving car project is no longer ambitious. The New York Timesreports that the company has relegated research for autonomous vehicles to a software system that will power a self- driving shuttle in between its new spaceship campus and its old offices. So much for reinventing the automobile experience. This is not to say that self- driving shuttle is lame. It’s a futuristic bus that drives itself! Apple even has a patent for a bendy bus with tank treads, which is a creative idea. But then you hear the name, and your reaction is inevitably, “Oh.” The self- driving shuttle is called PAIL (Palo Alto to Infinite Loop). While the bus isn’t yet running, it’s hard to imagine Apple employees needing a lift and chirping, “Let’s go hop in the PAIL!”What’s really disappointing about the Times report, however, are the details of the now abandoned automobile hardware efforts. We’ve known since last year that Apple was waffling on its self- driving car project—codenamed Project Titan—and shifting its focus away from building a car from the ground up towards building software that could power an autonomous car, a strategy that’s also been adopted by Waymo, the new Alphabet company that picked up Google’s old self- driving project. What we didn’t know were many specifics about what Apple thought it could do if it did build a car. Under the leadership of veteran Apple executive Bob Mansfield and with the vision of Apple accent- in- chief Jony Ive, the i. Car sounds like it was going to be awesome. It wasn’t really called the i. Car, but it’s funny to pretend that it was.) Just check out these new details from The Times: From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. We can only assume that this might have looked something like the Mercedes F0. Minority Report. That self- driving car design features cabin wrapped in touchscreens with captain’s chairs up front that swivel around to create a little mobile living room. ![]()
It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Apple’s once ambitious self-driving car project is no longer ambitious. The New York Times reports that the company has. Just take out that steering wheel and those pedals, turn the chrome into matte black, and it could almost be an Apple product.But wait there’s more.From The Times: Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel.A team within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels — round like a globe — instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement. Urdu To Arabic Learning Books Free Download . Apple thought about making its car roll around on big balls? ![]() ![]() That’s just crazy. It’s certainly ambitious! But it’s crazy. Apparently, after some infighting over building a fully autonomous car versus a semi- autonomous car, Apple pruned its plans back to a new so- called car. OS. This is evidently what will be powering the shuttle, and Apple presumably hopes the software will also find its way into cars designed and built by automotive companies like, well, Mercedes. You can’t feel too surprised, but it’s okay if you feel disappointed. An Apple- made mobile augmented reality chamber would’ve been really cool, and maybe we’ll get something close in a decade or two. For now, most of us are still stuck with our gas- guzzling death machines.[New York Times].
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