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- The Ultimate Flying Machine: Sexy as a Sports Car, Portable as a Jet SkiToday
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On the shore of Lake Isabella, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, a crowd of flight techs, most of them either pierced or tattooed, swarms around a small white airplane. It's called an Icon A5. It's a collaboration between an F-16 pilot and a skateboard designer, and it looks like an odd, rakish sea monster.
Today is the plane's first flight. Aeronautical calculations, computer simulations, and wind tunnel tests have been performed, of course. And yet ... every maiden flight is a dance with death. If all that math was foolproof, after all, no one would need test pilots.
At 6:30 am, the winds are calm. Jon Karkow pulls a parachute over his shoulders, hugs his girlfriend—a long embrace with whispers exchanged—and clambers into the cockpit; the A5 is remarkably stable on the water for something with a knife-edged underside. The tech crew chief closes the cockpit and gives the carbon-fiber skin a few pats; Karkow fires up the propeller and taxis the A5 out onto the lake.
A former F-16 jockey and a skateboard designer collaborate to design the tiny Icon A5 aircraft.For more, visit wired.com/video.Back on the beach, a square-jawed guy with closely cropped hair watches, frowning, his arms crossed.
- Mr. Know-It-All: Human Guinea Pigs, Cremains in Orbit, Surveillance VideoToday
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Dear Mr. Know-It-All, I'm a college student who makes money volunteering for medical experiments. Do I have to accept whatever fee the researchers offer me, or can I negotiate for more?
In principle, you're entitled to the same economic rights as the researchers, who likely spent long hours pleading for more dough from whatever drug company is footing their bills. So don't let the doctors guilt you into thinking that it's somehow unethical to treat guinea pigging as a regular job rather than a selfless calling. If they were the ones getting poked and prodded and restricted to bland food, they'd be keen to secure a fair wage, too.
That said, your odds of receiving a raise are practically nil. The supply of willing test subjects far exceeds the demand, a situation that puts human guinea pigs at a serious negotiating disadvantage. And since budgets are usually set long before the call goes out for volunteers, the researchers may not have much wiggle room.
Bob Helms, a veteran participant in clinical trials who edited the now-defunct zine Guinea Pig Zero, says he has managed to negotiate a higher fee only once, for an experiment that was unusually agonizing. (It involved catheters and pooping in baskets.) Helms banded together with his fellow test subjects and threatened to break protocols or drop out altogether, eventually persuading the experiment's sponsor to offer an $800 bump.
If you feel stro
- Jan. 7, 1851: Foucault's Pendulum ExperimentToday
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1851: Léon Foucault uses a pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It is the first direct visual evidence not based on watching the stars circle in the sky.
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was born in 1819. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school when he made his first scientific discovery: He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Without formal scientific training, he worked as a lab assistant and continued tinkering. He used the new Daguerreotype photographic process to take the first photograph of the sun. Together with Armand Fizeau, in 1850 he devised a way to use rotating mirrors to measure the speed of light. They observed that light travels more slowly in water than in air.
Scientists had been trying for two centuries to drop objects from towers and measure their drift as the planet spun beneath them. It didn't work: too quick, too crude, too many interfering factors.
Foucault had an insight. A pendulum hanging on a wire and swinging directly north and south would appear to the observer to slowly move its plane of oscillation as the Earth turned underneath it.
To grasp this, just picture a pendulum at the North Pole. It starts at zero degrees longitude and swings back and forth, as the Earth spins below it. For every hour it'
- Twitter Hacker Says Admin Password Was 'Happiness'Yesterday
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In an interview with Wired.com, an 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks admits to Monday's hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama's and the official feed for Fox News.
- Air Force Releases 'Counter-Blog' Marching OrdersYesterday
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Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don't be surprised. They're just following orders.
