Preview Your Drive From the Air, With Google Helicopter View

By Rebecca Boyle

Google Helo View An aerial view from Carmel to Big Sur. Google

Maps can only get you so far in life — sometimes you need to veer off the beaten path, take the scenic route, or figure out how to get there as the crow flies. Now Google will help you do that.Helicopter View: When Street View and River View just aren’t enough.

Google’s helicopter view provides a 3-D view of your journey, so you can envision all the hillsides and neighborhoods you would otherwise miss by driving on boring streets. And it’s a more realistic portrayal of how we see the world, which for the most part is horizontally, not looking down vertically.

Google uses California’s scenic Pacific Coast Highway as an example. A flat top-down view, like from a satellite or something, doesn’t really give you an appreciation for this pretty road, Google explains. But helicopter view lets you see the terrain in all its rugged, Big Sur-y glory.

You fill out Google Maps like you would for any other driving directions, but instead of a 2-D flat map, you get a lovely topographic map with Google Earth-style graphics. It turns on like any other feature of Google Maps, except that you need a Google Earth plugin.

You can fly along the route you’ve mapped out, and if you want to check out the surrounding area, you can pause the “flight” and click and drag the map like you would in Google Earth. Click on a different step in the directions list, and your flight will speed toward that step.

The Street View cars, tricycle and riverboat have all brought us real-perspective views on neighborhoods and remote areas, so could a Google Helicopter View chopper be coming next?

[Google Lat Long Blog via Slashdot]

NASA Awards the Largest Prize in Aviation History to an All-Electric, Super-Efficient Aircraft

By Clay Dillow

Pipistrel's Taurus G4 NASA HQ Photo

NASA has awarded the single largest prize handed down in aviation history to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for designing and demonstrating its Taurus G4 electric aircraft. Per the rules of the NASA- and Google-sponsored CAFE Green Flight Challenge, Pipistrel’s Taurus G4 covered 200 miles in less than 2 hours and did so on the electricity equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per passenger, scoring $1.35 million for the effort.

But the cash, substantial though it may be, is only part of the story here. The CAFE (that’s Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Challenge was created to push aircraft engineers toward new, more efficient airplane designs that would perhaps usher in a new era of ultra-efficient flight, based on either electric engines or extremely efficient fuel-burning engines.

So while you can argue the day belongs to Pipistrel--and we certainly don’t mean to diminish that achievement--the CAFE Foundation and NASA are the real winners here. Consider: The challenge asked teams to average 100 miles per hour over two hours, and to do so on the equivalent of one gallon of gas. Not only did Pipistrel manage this, but so did California-based e-Genius with its electric-powered plane (for which it netted a second place prize of $120,000).

The kicker: both teams did so on just a little more than a half-gallon of fuel equivalent. That means both Pipistrel and e-Genius did twice as well as NASA and CAFE asked them to do (and Pipistrel slightly better than e-Genius, hence the distribution of prizes).

That’s pretty amazing, considering that just a few years ago engineers were still trying to figure out how to get an all-electric powered plane into the air for any considerable length of time, much less at sustained triple-digit speeds and while using very little energy.

Our jetliners aren’t going green just yet of course. But the winning teams in the CAFE Green FLight Challenge collectively spent just two years and $4 million on two aircraft that have pushed the electric airplane field forward by a considerable step. Imagine what ten years and some serious investment might do for the electric aircraft space.

More background/details on Team Pipistrel-USA.com’s winning Taurus G4 in the video below.

[NASA]

Turning 'waste' into power

UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG

Waste heat is a byproduct of nearly all electrical devices and industrial processes. Image: MichaelUtech/iStockphoto Thermoelectric power generation is expected to play an increasingly important role in meeting the energy challenges of the future. And helping to meet that energy challenge is PhD student, Priyanka Jood, from the Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM) whose groundbreaking research has just been published in the American Chemical Society journal, Nano Letters. Priyanka, the first author of the paper, supervised by Dr Germanas Peleckis and Professor Xiaolin Wang, is working on thermoelectric materials which can generate electricity directly from waste heat. Dr Peleckis, Professor Wang, and the Director of the ISEM, Professor Shi Dou, are co-authors of the Nano Letters paper. The UOW team along with researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York have created large marble-size pellets of thermoelectric nanomaterials. Priyanka spent about a year working alongside the US team. The RPI team are also co-authors in the paper. The team was led by Professor Ganpati Ramanath and the other team members who contributed were Rutvik J. Mehta, Yanliang Zhang, Richard W. Siegel and Theo Borca-Tasciuc. Waste heat is sometimes referred to as secondary heat or low-grade heat which is heat produced by machines, electrical equipment and industrial processes. It is a byproduct of nearly all electrical devices and industrial processes from driving a car to flying an aircraft or operating a power plant. Now the UOW team based at the Innovation Campus along with engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed new nanomaterials that could lead to techniques for better capturing and putting this waste heat to work. The key ingredients for making marble-sized pellets of the new material are aluminium and a common everyday microwave oven. Harvesting electricity from waste heat requires a material that is good at conducting electricity but poor at conducting heat. One of the most promising candidates for this job is zinc oxide (ZnO) -- a non-toxic, inexpensive material with a high melting point. While nanoengineering techniques exist for boosting the electrical conductivity of zinc oxide, the material’s high thermal conductivity is a roadblock to its effectiveness in collecting and converting waste heat. Because thermal and electrical conductivity are related properties, it’s very difficult to decrease one without also diminishing the other. Now the UOW and US-based teams have demonstrated a new way to decrease zinc oxide’s thermal conductivity without reducing its electrical conductivity. The innovation involves adding minute amounts of aluminium to zinc oxide, and processing the materials in a microwave oven. The research could lead to new technologies for harvesting waste heat and creating highly energy efficient cars, aircraft, power plants, and other systems. Researchers say harvesting waste heat is a very attractive proposition, since the heat can be converted into electricity and used to power devices such as a car that is creating the heat in the first place. This would reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Priyanka said it was possible that even further power factor enhancements using nano-structured zinc oxide might be possible making this material highly valuable for thermoelectrical industrial applications. She said that researchers at ISEM are continuing to explore new and novel methods for producing high performance thermoelectric materials as a part of their research program in energy storage and energy conversion materials. Results of the Australian Research Council funded study entitled “Al-Doped Zinc Oxide Nanocomposites with Enhanced Thermoelectric Properties,” can be seen online at Nano Letters at this site. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.