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Leonardo da Vinci, of Florence, dreamt of doing it. Todd Reichert, of the University of Toronto, actually did.
On Wednesday, Reichert, a PhD student at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies, announced he had completed the first continuous flight of a human-powered aircraft with birdlike flapping wings, a device known as an ornithopter.
One of the most common questions I get asked is whether gravity is instantaneous, or whether there’s a speed limit to how fast the force of gravity can travel.
OH SH-
This is (ok, will be in maybe two years) the most amazing thing science has done thus far. Mark my words.
Frankenstein!
We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
Climatologists have puzzled over why global average temperatures have stayed roughly flat in the past decade, despite a long-term warming trend. New research suggests that lower levels of water vapor in the stratosphere may partly explain the anomaly.
People seem to need an overarching explanation of things—of origins, meaning, purpose, and destiny. Christianity provided these things for a long time but, at the close of the Enlightenment, was losing its luster among the educated. Too much in Christianity just didn’t make sense in light of continuing discoveries. The sciences were more compelling, and a better fit for the changing mood of the times.
