Gryphon winged suit drops in for some serious air time

Are you were waiting for a good reason to join the armed forces?

Perhaps you are just a kid who always dreamed of flying and never grew up, or maybe you are thinking of challenging Yves (Jetman) Rossy in the human winged flight game?

This could be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Get ready to duck … the Gryphon Next Generation Parachute System could be headed your way.

Although engine-less, the Gryphon still has an electronic guidance system and heads-up display navigation and all equipment is cleverly tucked away making for better “stealth” flights.

Aimed at the military, this high-tech human gliding device allows parachutists to leap from planes and glide in any chosen direction (except up) at speeds around 60mph - a somewhat conservative speed suggested by the manufacturers - SPELCO (Special Parachute and Logistics Consortium).

Presently, a parachute is used to stop and drop a flier to the ground or at his target but SPELCO says it plans to develop a version that can be landed by itself.

The consortium, comprising two German companies, produces a variety of parachute systems, helmets, oxygen supplies and other gear and services. But the Gryphon Next Generation Parachute System is what has pricked most people’s interest.

SPELCO says the Gryphon system is designed for use in “high-altitude, high-opening” jump missions, typically carried out by Special Forces.

This 6ft wing delivers great maneuverability with a glide ratio of 5:1, which means if you step out at five miles high (26,000ft), you can glide for 25 miles.

According to the consortium the suit performed over 50 test flights back in 2006 and it says the next step is to look at mounting small engines (as Yves Rossy does) which would increase its mission range, speed … and possibilities!

A single scale tells more: Butterfly wings

The Morpho menelaus butterfly with a magnified image of a wing scale (left) and zinc oxide scale replicas with a magnified image (right)

Scientists in China have made zinc oxide replicas of single scales from butterfly wings to understand and exploit their optical properties for sensor and solar cell applications.

Butterfly wings are made up of chitin scales and their iridescent blue and green colours are generated by light and air travelling through the chitin. The way the scales are arranged dictates which colour is seen. Studying the wings' properties to replicate the process could lead to the design of new photonic crystal structures for optical devices.

Until now, researchers have focused on making devices based on whole butterfly wings, but Jiajun Gu and Di Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and their team, believe that this misses important mechanisms and phenomena. This is because whole wings are covered by redundant parts, such as wing membranes, which could alter the optical properties of the wings' scales.

Photonic crystal structures can control light reflectance, so have the potential to be applied in optical computers, as well as sensors and solar cells. But they are hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair and are difficult to fabricate.

This creates a bottleneck in the process of understanding them and their applications. 'If the structures can be made similar to photonic crystal structures borrowed from natural species, novel photonic crystals that are unavailable through traditional artificial methods can be fabricated,' say Gu and Zhang.

The team used individual butterfly scales as templates to create the zinc oxide replicas. 'It's like a natural fossilisation process, but by doing it in the lab, we can make it faster,' say Gu and Zhang.

They studied the way the replicas reflect light. Changing the angle that the light hits the scale reduces the reflectance intensity by a factor of ten, and the replicas' optical properties matched those of the original scales.

'The angle-dependent investigation of isolated, single butterfly wing scales and their zinc oxide replicas provides interesting new details and will help us to better understand nature's strategies to manipulate light,' says Michael Bartl, an expert on functional nanostructured materials for energy and information technology applications from the University of Utah, US. 'However, the exact impact of these complex architectures on the behavior of light is still not completely resolved.'

Gu and Zhang hope to explore novel uses for the structures in light manipulation and colour display.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both!

New research suggests that a bird-shaped airplane — with angled wings and a fatter body — would make the modern plane more fuel efficient.

Geoffrey Spedding, an engineer at the University of Southern California, spoke about this discovery — and how it could change the way we fly.


How did you discover that a bird-shaped design would make planes more efficient?
To start at the beginning, Joachim Huyssen [of North-West University] in South Africa was wondering about efficient aerodynamic designs and whether the current dominant configuration is the best available.

There are several features of that design that are aerodynamically not convenient and not optimal. The best possible [design] from an aerodynamic point of view is a wing by itself.

You would think then the best possible airplane would be a flying wing, and, in fact, flying wings have been made but the difficulty is two-fold:

• You have to make the wing so big to pack people and cargo in that you end up wasting a lot of space. The waste of space causes aerodynamic drag, the airplane is more heavy than it should be. Your optimal design turns out to be not optimal after all.
• All existing airplanes have this tail plane in back. The purpose of the tail plane is to provide pitch stability. The nose goes up or the nose goes down — you control that with the tail plane. This comparatively little tail plane sits at the end of a long body on the conventional plane. The purpose of the long body is to carry the tail plane and put it a long way [from the plane's center of gravity], so it has a large effect. But that’s a really inefficient way to do business. All the time you’re dragging this tail plane through the air, its only purpose is to make sure you don’t pitch up or down. It doesn’t otherwise do any good and it forces you to have a long, cigar-shaped body, which is not the best shape a body can be.

Article Continued here It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both! - SmartPlanet

Transparent Winged Butterfly - Chorinea Faunus

Chorinea faunus, a transparent winged butterfly from Satipo, Peru, is shown on a large array of micro-structured elastomeric pressure sensors.

New artificial "skin" fashioned out of flexible semiconductor materials can sense touch, making it possible to create robots with a grip delicate enough to hold an egg, yet strong enough to grasp the frying pan, US researchers said