There's been many inventions and innovations that have been profiled at the various SolidWorks World conferences. This week's Tuesday Two covers to wind power winners that are getting notice.
Tuesday Two
Magenn has an innovative balloon wind power generator which goes by the name Mageen Air Rotor System (MARS). It floats far above the ground to take advantage of wind that is more reliable than ground based turbines. Here's an ancillary article in Design World on material used to make MARS.
Jeff Ray gives us an update on MicroWind Technologies which makes relatively small rooftop wind turbines called MicroWind Residential Turbine which will be able to produce 3 kW. They also have the MicroWind 300W which can be lamp post mounted.Epoch-Fail
The Smart car that just isn't all that smart. It is not much bigger than a go cart, while only netting 41 MPG highway (which is worse than many real cars already on the market). Too much is sacrificed in both functionality and safety for no real gain; and don't get me started about the price for the "well equipped" version! For that, it recently ranked as the worse car of the 2000's by Cars.com, not to mention it wins this week's Epoch-Fail award!
improves, we are finding that terrestrial planets seem to exist in a wide variety of star system types. In a presentation to the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, MI on June 2, a team of astronomers stated that they used the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics II telescope (New Zealand) to find a planet around a brown dwarf star. The planet is estimated as being about three times the mass of Earth.