In October 2014, Slovakian company AeroMobil unveiled a prototype vehicle that exhilarated Back To The Future fans, as well as pretty much everyone else: the long fantasized flying car. Dubbed AeroMobil 3.0, the car/plane hybrid showed off its driving and flying abilities in a video filmed at the 2014 Pioneers Festival in Vienna. With its wings tucked in, the carbon fiber vehicle drives the streets seamlessly with other cars. Then, it makes its way to a parking lot, unfolds its wings, and takes off from a grass runway. It soars leisurely over the buildings of Vienna, before touching down in a green field.
We are undeniably living in the future. Today, the evidence is this glowing-red hole burnt straight through a truck's engine by a high-powered laser at a distance of one mile Released this week, the above photo shows just what Lockheed Martin's newest directed energy weapon can do.
Yesterday, in a flash of silver and yellow, a relic from an old war crashed to earth. From the broken body of this vintage World War II trainer, Harrison Ford emerged onto a Los Angeles area golf course. Ford was treated in a hospital for a gash on his head and a broken arm.
In 2003 Popular Science asked readers: "Will most Americans be driving hydrogen-powered cars by 2015?" The results to that poll are lost to time, but we already know the answer, even if 2015 isn't over yet. Unfortunately, the green technology hasn't been adopted in the past 12 years--but the next decade looks promising.
No one wants to be the first to discover the use of a chemical weapon on a battlefield, but if anyone must have that job, the new Par Chemical Biological Radioactive Nuclear (CBRN) Reconnaissance Vehicle is the car to do it in. Developed by Turkish defense contractor FNSS, the CBRN version is a light armored vehicle ready for the end of the world. Even if its name is a jargony mess.
China's most powerful aircraft engine, the WS-20, is getting closer to finishing its tests. With a power output of 14 tons, the WS-20 will replace the less powerful and less efficient Russian D-30KP, which has only 10.5 tons of thrust. The WS-20 turbofan has been flying on this Il-76 test aircraft since 2014, and it's likely that aerial testing will wrap up in late 2015.
