quarta-feira, 27 de maio de 2015

Kahn Design unleashes Aston Martin Vengeance and Land Rover Defender fury


The 105 Defender Pick Up starts just under £59,000


The 105 Defender Pick Up starts just under £59,000 (Credit: Kahn Design)

Image Gallery (15 images)

It's been a big year for Kahn Design. The British tuning shop has been making headlines regularly, thanks to projects like the Land Rover Defender 6x6. Its latest two designs aren't quite as extreme as that Geneva-debuted six-wheeler, but they're quite interesting in their own right. The Aston Martin Vengeance and Flying Huntsman 105 Defender Pick Up exist at opposite ends of the automotive spectrum, but they both share a level of visual "wow."
Kahn revealed the 105 Defender Pick Up Prototype at the Great British Land Rover Show last month. The latest member of its Flying Huntsman family, this new prototype is based on a Defender 90 pickup, gaining an extra 15 inches (381 mm) of wheelbase length to meet its "105" designation. A set of burly fenders adds 6 in (150 mm) of width.
In addition to its increased dimensions, Kahn's Defender wears a new body kit, starting with a new front bumper, X-Lander grille and shadow chrome headlamps. A set of matte black 18-in Defend 1945 Retro wheels roll below extended wheel arches, and a hood release cable and side steps add simple convenience.
Kahn doesn't mention any tuning for the Defender 90's 2.2-liter diesel four, but it has added a six-speed automatic transmission. It has also overhauled the brakes and suspension and redesigned the interior with leather trim, refashioned instruments, a Churchill clock, a three-spoke billet steering wheel and vented machined aluminum foot pedals.
Kahn will offer the 105 Defender Pick Up package with a variety of color, trim and finish options, starting at £58,875 (approx. US$90,350).
Moving away from rugged 4x4 utility vehicles, Kahn has also recently teased an upcoming Aston Martin DB9 package it calls "Vengeance." The car earns that moniker by flashing its teeth angrily in a large, aggressive grille, a few extra big teeth over the prowling saber-toothed cat Kahn took inspiration from.

Moving backward, Kahn has removed any hint of angularity and transformed the DB9 with a series of flowing curves and surface volumes, best exemplified by the bulging rear fenders. The car rides on roulette-inspired two-tone wheels, 20 in/16 spoke up front and 21 in/18 spoke out back.
"Launching the Vengeance is the realization of a dream I’ve had since childhood, to design and produce my own car," Kahn CEO Afzal Kahn explains. "The design has gone through several iterations over the years and I’ve taken my time in selecting the right partners to prototype and manufacture the car, ensuring it represents the pinnacle of quality and perfection. I’ve kept every aspect of the underlying car from the crash structures to airbags – mechanically it’s unaltered – why change perfection? This is coachbuilding in its traditional sense – taking a tried and tested product and working solely on the aesthetic."
Kahn plans to begin hand-building a limited number of Vengeance models later this year, but has not yet announced pricing.

Source: Kahn Design

Mr. Everything wireless speaker can jump start a car



If the car's dead battery needs a jolt, Mr. Everything has a 16 V/2 A DC out port

In a very crowded marketplace, what can a newcomer to the Bluetooth speaker arena do to stand out from the crowd? Well, in the case of Mr. Everything, it's pack as much functionality and usefulness into a portable audio throwing box as possible. The water-resistant speaker comes with integrated emergency lighting, a wireless charging pad and enough stored juice to charge up a MacBook's battery twice or, as mentioned above, jump start a car. It's even got built-in storage. Not the flash memory kind, but somewhere to stow away essentials like protein bars or first aid supplies.
Described as an all-in-one charging station and speaker, Mr. Everything's built-in 14.8 V/6,700 mAh Li-Pol battery is reported capable of charging an iPhone 6 up to 15 times. The portable power bank is also being promoted as a source of emergency backup power should an earthquake, tornado or other natural disaster knock out the mains supply.

There's a lid up top which opens to a utility box for storing charging cables, earphones, thumb drives, house keys or all manner of modern life's necessities. The lid is also home to a Qi charging pad for wireless top ups of compatible smartphones. Each of the four USB ports provides 2.1 amps at 5 V, and if the car's dead battery needs a jolt then there's a 16 V/2 A DC out port, too. A similar Mr. Everything+ model also includes a universal AC outlet.
On the upper face, there's a groove for slotting in a tablet or smartphone for hands-free viewing and a line of playback and volume control buttons. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information available on what to expect from the speakers, other than the very vague assurance of "high quality Bluetooth-enabled audio" and that they'll be "comparable to expensive brand name speakers." This is because the final configuration has not yet been determined.
The Los Angeles-based development team (which includes a former senior engineer/researcher at Samsung) is currently considering three different units, with the lowest setup comprising two 6 W speakers rated at 8 ohms impedance.
Elsewhere, there's NFC connectivity (1 amp at 5 V), an aux-in jack to cater for non-Bluetooth devices and two LED lighting modules – a bright white one for use as a flashlight and some color-changing RGB mood lighting.

Mr. Everything and Mr. Everything+ are currently at the working prototype stage, each measuring 10.6 x 7.1 x 5.1 inches (269 x 180 x 129.5 mm) – though there is talk of reducing that bulk by about 30 percent for increased portability in the final products. Before consumers can actually get their hands on them however, the developers have launched on Kickstarter.
Early bird pledge levels of US$199 for the standard model and $299 for the Plus version have recently been extended, with backers potentially saving up to $150 off the expected retail price of each. The campaign runs until June 15 and, if all goes to plan, delivery to anywhere in the world is set to start in November/December.


Uma mansão dentro de um Boeing 747.





Terrifying bridges and big dogs









Advance in Quantum error correction


 Tue, 05/26/2015 - 7:25am
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office
A new quantum error correcting code requires measurements of only a few quantum bits at a time, to ensure consistency between one stage of a computation and the next. Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
A new quantum error correcting code requires measurements of only a few quantum bits at a time, to ensure consistency between one stage of a computation and the next.

A new quantum error correcting code requires measurements of only a few quantum bits at a time, to ensure consistency between one stage of a computation and the next. Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
Quantum computers are largely theoretical devices that could perform some computations exponentially faster than conventional computers can. Crucial to most designs for quantum computers is quantum error correction, which helps preserve the fragile quantum states on which quantum computation depends.

The ideal quantum error correction code would correct any errors in quantum data, and it would require measurement of only a few quantum bits, or qubits, at a time. But until now, codes that could make do with limited measurements could correct only a limited number of errors—one roughly equal to the square root of the total number of qubits. So they could correct eight errors in a 64-qubit quantum computer, for instance, but not 10.


In a paper they’re presenting at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Theory of Computing in June, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Google, the Univ. of Sydney and Cornell Univ. present a new code that can correct errors afflicting a specified fraction of a computer’s qubits, not just the square root of their number. And that fraction can be arbitrarily large, although the larger it is, the more qubits the computer requires.
“There were many, many different proposals, all of which seemed to get stuck at this square-root point,” says Aram Harrow, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, who led the research. “So going above that is one of the reasons we’re excited about this work.”
Like a bit in a conventional computer, a qubit can represent 1 or 0, but it can also inhabit a state known as “quantum superposition,” where it represents 1 and 0 simultaneously. This is the reason for quantum computers’ potential advantages: A string of qubits in superposition could, in some sense, perform a huge number of computations in parallel.
Once you perform a measurement on the qubits, however, the superposition collapses, and the qubits take on definite values. The key to quantum algorithm design is manipulating the quantum state of the qubits so that when the superposition collapses, the result is (with high probability) the solution to a problem.
Baby, bathwater
But the need to preserve superposition makes error correction difficult. “People thought that error correction was impossible in the ’90s,” Harrow explains. “It seemed that to figure out what the error was you had to measure, and measurement destroys your quantum information.”
The first quantum error correction code was invented in 1994 by Peter Shor, now the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, with an office just down the hall from Harrow’s. Shor is also responsible for the theoretical result that put quantum computing on the map, an algorithm that would enable a quantum computer to factor large numbers exponentially faster than a conventional computer can. In fact, his error-correction code was a response to skepticism about the feasibility of implementing his factoring algorithm.
Shor’s insight was that it’s possible to measure relationships between qubits without measuring the values stored by the qubits themselves. A simple error-correcting code could, for instance, instantiate a single qubit of data as three physical qubits. It’s possible to determine whether the first and second qubit have the same value, and whether the second and third qubit have the same value, without determining what that value is. If one of the qubits turns out to disagree with the other two, it can be reset to their value.
In quantum error correction, Harrow explains, “These measurement always have the form ‘Does A disagree with B?’ Except it might be, instead of A and B, A B C D E F G, a whole block of things. Those types of measurements, in a real system, can be very hard to do. That’s why it’s really desirable to reduce the number of qubits you have to measure at once.”


Time embodied
A quantum computation is a succession of states of quantum bits. The bits are in some state; then they’re modified, so that they assume another state; then they’re modified again; and so on. The final state represents the result of the computation.
In their paper, Harrow and his colleagues assign each state of the computation its own bank of qubits; it’s like turning the time dimension of the computation into a spatial dimension. Suppose that the state of qubit eight at time five has implications for the states of both qubit 8 and qubit 11 at time six. The researchers’ protocol performs one of those agreement measurements on all three qubits, modifying the state of any qubit that’s out of alignment with the other two.
Since the measurement doesn’t reveal the state of any of the qubits, modification of a misaligned qubit could actually introduce an error where none existed previously. But that’s by design: The purpose of the protocol is to ensure that errors spread through the qubits in a lawful way. That way, measurements made on the final state of the qubits are guaranteed to reveal relationships between qubits without revealing their values. If an error is detected, the protocol can trace it back to its origin and correct it.
It may be possible to implement the researchers’ scheme without actually duplicating banks of qubits. But, Harrow says, some redundancy in the hardware will probably be necessary to make the scheme efficient. How much redundancy remains to be seen: Certainly, if each state of a computation required its own bank of qubits, the computer might become so complex as to offset the advantages of good error correction.
But, Harrow says, “Almost all of the sparse schemes started out with not very many logical qubits, and then people figured out how to get a lot more. Usually, it’s been easier to increase the number of logical qubits than to increase the distance—the number of errors you can correct. So we’re hoping that will be the case for ours, too.”

The Sikorsky S-97 Raider prototype takes to the air for the first time


 

The Sikorsky S-97 Raider prototype takes to the air for the first time

The Sikorsky S-97 Raider prototype takes to the air for the first time
 
Sikorsky's S-97 Raider prototype helicopter, which was revealed to the world last year, has taken to the air for the first time. Based on the design of the X2 Technology Demonstrator, the S-97 Raider features coaxial counter-rotating main rotors and a pusher propeller and is intended as a multi-mission aircraft to replace the US Army’s OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter and the Special Forces’ MH-6 Little Bird.
While Sikorsky anticipates it will be capable of cruise speeds of up to 240 knots (276 mph, 444 km/h), and the X2 demonstrator achieved a speed of 250 knots (288 mph, 463 km/h) in 2010, the S-97 Raider's first flight was limited to a series of maneuvers intended to test its hover and low-speed capabilities. With pilot Bill Fell and co-pilot Kevin Bredenbeck at the controls, the maiden flight at Sikorsky's Development Flight Center (DFC) in Florida lasted around an hour.

Having successfully completed its first flight, the S-97 Raider prototype will now move onto more progressive flight testing intended to demonstrate capabilities critical to a variety of potential combat missions, including armed reconnaissance, light assault, light attack and special operations.
Sikorsky has a demonstration tour planned for the S-97 Raider in 2016. A second prototype is also currently under construction, and is set to be completed by the end of this year.
Source: Sikorsky