Fix It Future Blink Self Made Small Talk AI at Heart Watch of the Week Amplify The Best of 2024 AI at Play Watch History Office Ladies Podcast Don't Freak Out All Series Elisha Sauers writes about space for Mashable, taking deep dives into NASA's moon and Mars missions, chatting up astronauts and history-making discoverers, and jetting above the clouds . Through 17 years of reporting, she's covered a variety of topics, including health, business, and government, with a penchant for public records requests. She previously worked for in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Annapolis, Maryland. Her work has earned numerous state awards, including the Virginia Press Association's top honor, Best in Show, and national recognition for narrative storytelling. For each year she has covered space, Sauers has won National Headliner Awards, including first place for her Sex in Space series.

In fact, nanorobotics has become a rapidly growing field of research. It is considered a promising approach, for example, for delivering active substances to specific locations in the body. Unlike their larger-scale counterparts, they are not made of electronics, computer chips, and software, but rather of biomolecules and nanoparticles. Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Cornelia Palivan from the University of Basel are now reporting on a sophisticated modular nanorobot with greater functional flexibility than many existing systems. "Previous nanorobots are often designed for a specific task only," says Cornelia Palivan.

Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles will open new opportunities in aviation. This paper describes the design and wind tunnel analysis of an eVTOL uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) prototype with a traditional aircraft wing, tail, and puller motor along with four vertical thrust pusher motors. Vehicle design and construction are summarized. Dynamic thrust from propulsion modules is experimentally determined at different airspeeds over a large sweep of propeller angles of attack. Wind tunnel tests with the vehicle prototype cover a suite of hover, transition and cruise flight conditions. Net aerodynamic forces and moments are distinctly computed and compared for plane, quadrotor and hybrid flight modes. Coefficient-based models are developed. Polynomial curve fits accurately capture observed data over all test configurations. To our knowledge, the presented wind tunnel experimental analysis for a multi-mode eVTOL platform is novel. Increased drag and reduced dynamic thrust likely due to flow interactions will be important to address in future designs.

Cargo drones are designed to carry payloads with predefined shape, size, and/or mass. This lack of flexibility requires a fleet of diverse drones tailored to specific cargo dimensions. Here we propose a new reconfigurable drone based on a modular design that adapts to different cargo shapes, sizes, and mass. We also propose a method for the automatic generation of drone configurations and suitable parameters for the flight controller. The parcel becomes the drone's body to which several individual propulsion modules are attached. We demonstrate the use of the reconfigurable hardware and the accompanying software by transporting parcels of different mass and sizes requiring various numbers and propulsion modules' positioning. The experiments are conducted indoors (with a motion capture system) and outdoors (with an RTK-GNSS sensor). The proposed design represents a cheaper and more versatile alternative to the solutions involving several drones for parcel transportation.