Best of What's New 2005

mmoyer writes "Begin the onslaught of year-end roundups. Popular Science takes the early lead with their Best of What's New awards, a roundup of what they consider the top 100 products and technologies of the year. In addition to the obvious awardees like the PSP and perpendicular magnetic recording, there's interesting asides like the world's first programmable wave pool and colored toy bubbles made from disappearing dye."

Just a note

[FST]

For those of you that don't know what perpendicular magnetic recording is, it is basically a new technology recently introduced by Toshiba into their line of MP3 players which is a way of stacking the bits perpendicular to the hard disk rather than laterally. Conventional HDD can hold up to 400 GB while this new technology allows for 10 times the storage per square inch. Many of the hard disk drives plan to introduce a new hard disk in pc's by 2007.

In my opinion, with this new jump in technology, the future is secure with HDD of similar size, yet 10x the capacity.

lets Get Perpendicular!

[simcop2387]

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

a very informative animation explaining how to do Perpendicular Magnetic Recording

Re:A "grand award" for colored soap bubbles?

[AKAImBatman]

The real technology being given the award isn't the bubbles. It's the dyes themselves, which are as close to a programmable pigment as we're going to get. From the sounds of it, the pigments are even non-toxic, making it a rather amazing invention for someone who just wanted to make colored bubbles.

Re:Just a note

[Xarius]

Maybe it's time to Get Perpendicular! [hitachigst.com]

Re:A "grand award" for colored soap bubbles?

[Z0mb1eman]

If you'd RTFA, you might find your answer.

The colored bubbles are cool because no one's successfully done it before, getting the dye to spread uniformly over the entire bubble (as opposed to just flowing to the bottom) isn't trivial, and it took the guy about 10 years to actually get it done.

But my guess is the grand award part comes in because of the specific dye they developed in the process. Specifically, this dye disappears after at most half an hour - faster if it's subjected to friction (eg. you can just rub it off your skin, out of your clothes, or whatever it lands on). The article claims (I'm not a chemist, so I don't know how true it is) that this is an entirely new type of dye.

One of the applications they listed was toothpaste that colors the inside of a kid's mouth a bright color until they've brushed the necessary 30 seconds.

All in all, to me it sounds like it deserves it - it's a new concept that opens up entirely new fields of innovation, rather than an iterative improvement over previous technology.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They're talking about octane rating

[DG]

Disclaimer: I build and race turbocharged race cars http://farnorthracing.com/ [farnorthracing.com]

To oversimplify a complex subject, when you burn fuels in a spark-ignited engine, it is possible to get a kind of explosive combustion called "detonation" instead of a nice smooth rapid burn.

Detonation is also sometimes called "knock" and it is an engine killer. Detonation is Not Your Friend.

The things that tend to increase the liklihood of experiencing detonation are a lean fuel/air mixture, excessive ignition advance, localized hotspots in the combustion chamber, excessive static compression ratio, excessive intake temperature, or excessive intake boost pressure.

The measure of a fuel's ability to resist detonation is its "octane" rating. The derivation of the term is an article in of itself... bottom line is the higher the octane, the lower the probability of detonation.

My race car drinks 118 octane, because it uses a ton of turbo boost and a lot of ignition advance to make power. Most regular pump gasses are 87-89 octane, and premium runs about 91-94 octane.

Ethenol is an octane booster (Sunoco's 94 octane fuel has a lot of it) so all else being equal, it is safer to run higher boost levels when there is ethenol present in the fuel.

DG

Re:Dyed Toothpaste

[pbhj]

Dentists used to have things called "disclosing tablets" that I got given as a child (about 1985-ish) they turned your mouth bright pink and where way coool ... it looked like you were a vampire that had just finished feasting!

You'd brush away the dye to show that you've cleaned properly.

FWIW

Sikorsky X2

[StikyPad]

The counter-rotating blade concept isn't new by any means.. Many early helicopter designs used the concept to cancel torque, but tail rotors proved to solve the issue of torque while also adding a high degree of control.

In helicopters, 180MPH is generally the speed limit, because that's when the aircraft's airspeed approaches the angular velocity of the rotor on it's rearward sweep. If the aircraft is traveling forward at roughly the same speed that the rotor is sweeping backward, it can't generate any lift on that side. It seems like increasing the rate of rotation would solve the problem, but the short answer is that that introduces even more problems.

Most twin-blade craft use tandem or intermeshing props, like the Chinook or V22. I'm guessing the coaxial counter-rotating design hasn't been popular because it's orders of magnitude (Score: 5, Used "orders of magnitude" in a sentence) more complicated than a standard prop. One of the main concerns in warfare is equipment reliability -- things working when you need them most. If coaxial designs are significantly less reliable in practice, that's a tremendous offset to any possible tactical advantage.

Re:It's not "What's New" without Phil & Dixie

[Walker]

Phil Foglio is too busy with his Girl Genius [girlgeniusonline.com] web comic.