New Holland launches the world's most powerful combine harvester

New Holland Agriculture's CR10.90 - the new horsepower heavyweight champion of the combine harvester world

Is there a horsepower war in the combine harvester segment? Probably not, but it's more fun if we pretend there is. New Holland Agriculture has thrown down a grainy gauntlet to Claas, John Deere and the rest of the harvesting industry by releasing the CR10.90 – the world's most powerful combine harvester with a chaff-smoking 652 horsepower (486 kW) fit to thresh the plants off the competition.

Combine harvesters have been a very significant part of the global industrial revolution. Consider that back in 1850, more than half of all American workers were farm laborers, doing tedious work like hand-cutting, threshing and winnowing wheat – and coming up with truly awful songs like this one.

Today, the US agriculture sector is exponentially more productive, while using only some 2.4 percent of the workforce, according to the University of California, Riverside.

The combine harvester has saved our species an awful lot of work. Its gigantic cutting head clips the grain-bearing heads off the wheat stalks and sucks them up into a threshing machine that essentially beats the heck out of the wheat ears to knock the grains out. Then it bounces and shakes the wheat around to separate the grain from the husks and fires each bit out a different hole so the grains can be collected for milling, and the chaff can be used as livestock feed or discarded.

The CR10.90 is the new Big Daddy of the combine world, with its 16-liter, six-cylinder inline diesel engine, the Cursor 16, pumping out a massive 652 horsepower (486 kW), and a 14,500 liter grain storage tank.

A machine this large and heavy could easily crush the soil beneath it to the point where growing further crops could be very difficult. So to combat this, New Holland has fitted the CR10.90 with a SmartTrax flexible track fitted with Terraglide suspension – a combination that allows the track to conform to the surface of the field as closely as possible, distributing the harvester's weight over a large, broad footprint.

We look forward to seeing how the CR10.90 performs on the dyno and quarter mile drag strip.

World-record 43 Tbps data transfer speed set by Danish researchers

DTU researchers have set a new data transmission record of 43 Tbps over optical fiber (Photo: Shutterstock)

Using a new type of optical fiber, researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have transmitted data over a single optical fiber at a speed of 43 terabits per second (43 Tbps) to set a new data transmission world record. This beats the previous record of 32 Tbps set by researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Although the High-Speed Optical Communications (HSOC) team at DTU Fotonik had previously achieved the world's highest combined data transmission speed of 1 petabit per second (Pbps) using hundreds of lasers, the team's 43 Tbps record was achieved with a single laser in the transmitter, making it much more energy efficient.

The new record was made possible by using a new type of optical fiber borrowed from Japan telco NTT that contains seven glass thread cores instead of the single core found in standard optical fibers. Although the seven cores allows the fiber to transfer more data, the team says it does not take up any more space than a standard optical fiber.

The team says the quest for faster and faster data transmission speeds will help in the development of technology that will accommodate the ever-increasing growth of internet traffic, which it estimates is growing by 40 to 50 percent annually, simultaneously increasing bandwidth while cutting energy consumption.

The team says its new record has been verified and presented in a post deadline paper at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2014 international conference held in San Hose, California last month.

MIT to test making oxygen on Mars

Subsystems on the MOXIE instrument (Image: NASA)

Oxygen is such an abundant resource on Earth that we rarely think about it unless we get locked in a cupboard. However, for space engineers, the question of how to get enough of the vital gas is constant, frustrating problem. To help future explorers of the Red Planet get enough oxygen for life support and powering spacecraft, NASA has included MIT’s MOXIE experiment on the Mars 2020 mission to study how to make oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere.

Sending a manned mission to Mars not only involves technical problems far beyond anything previously attempted, but also logistical problems equivalent to that of a small war stretched across a hundred million miles of space. Many tons of spares, food, water, fuel, and oxygen would need to be transported to keep the astronauts alive and many times more fuel would be needed to transport it all.

Previously, this wasn't as great a problem. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, they carried everything they needed for their journey. On Mars, that may not be practical unless you want a spacecraft the size of a small aircraft carrier. Instead, scientists and engineers are exploring ways that future missions could live off the land when they arrive on the Red Planet.

"When we send humans to Mars, we will want them to return safely, and to do that they need a rocket to lift off the planet’” says Michael Hecht of MIT's Haystack Observatory. “That’s one of the largest pieces of the mass budget that we would need to send astronauts there and back. So if we can eliminate that piece by making the oxygen on Mars, we’re way ahead of the game."

MIT’s Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is one possible answer. Developed in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s based on the fact that the Martian atmosphere, though extremely thin, is composed of 96 percent carbon dioxide, which means its a vast potential source of oxygen for future explorers and settlers. Essentially, MOXIE is a fuel cell in reverse. Instead of generating electricity by using oxygen to burn a fuel, it uses a process called solid oxide electrolysis , where electricity is employed to split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide.

This process would see Martian air pumped into the unit through a dust filter and pressurized before being passed into a fuel cell. At high temperatures, some ceramic oxides act as oxygen ion conductors. In the fuel cell, a thin, non-porous disc of this ceramic separates two porous electrodes. One electrode acts as the cathode and the other as the anode. Carbon dioxide passes through the cathode and when it comes into contact with the ceramic, the interaction of electricity and the ceramic causes the carbon dioxide to split into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The oxygen and the carbon monoxide are then separated and the oxygen stored.

MOXIE is one of seven major experiments be flown on the US$1.9 billion Mars 2020 mission, which is scheduled to fly in July 2020. Based on the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover currently exploring the Gale Crater region of the planet. The other instruments are intended to study Mars, but MOXIE stands out because it’s more of a practical experiment.

"If you were one of those astronauts depending on an oxygen tank for your ride home, I think you’d like to see it tested on Mars before you go," says Hecht. "We want to invest in a simple prototype before we are convinced. We've never run a factory on Mars. But this is what we’re doing; we’re running a prototype factory to see what problems we might come up against."

According to MIT, if MOXIE is successful, a scaled up version could be of great help to future explorers in providing oxygen for breathing and fuel. One scenario could see a nuclear-powered robotic plant sent ahead to produce and stockpile oxygen ready to be used when astronauts arrive.

NASA says puzzling new space drive can generate thrust without propellant

According to a puzzling report, a new thruster design appears to be able to accelerate a craft without the use of propellant (Image: Cannae)

A NASA study has recently concluded that the "Cannae Drive," a disruptive new method of space propulsion, can produce small amounts of thrust without the use of propellant, in apparent discordance with Newton's third law. According to its inventor, the device can harness microwave radiation inside a resonator, turning electricity into a net thrust. If further verified and perfected, the advance could revolutionize the space industry, dramatically cutting costs for both missions in deep space and satellites in Earth orbit.

The basic principle behind space propulsion is very simple: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Use a rocket engine to throw mass one way, get propelled the other way. And according to the law of conservation of momentum, the more mass you throw behind you and the faster you throw it, the stronger your forward thrust will be.

One consequence for space travel is that, to counter Earth's gravity and reach orbital velocity, rockets need to carry a very large amount of propellant: For instance, in the now-retired Space Shuttle, the mass of the fuel was almost twenty times greater than the payload itself. In satellites the impact is smaller, but still very significant: for geostationary satellites, fuel can make up as much as half the launch weight, and that makes them more expensive to launch and operate.

But now, a NASA study has concluded that a new type of spacecraft propulsion is able to generate thrust without propellant. This appears to violate the law of conservation of momentum: in other words, if no mass (fuel or otherwise) is being ejected from the system, where is the thrust coming from? Where is the equal and opposite reaction?

According to its inventor, US scientist Guido Fetta, the thruster works as a resonating cavity for microwave radiation. The cavity redirects the radiation pressure to create an unbalanced force, and that force produces a net thrust.

In its study NASA didn't attempt to explain the phenomenon, and instead contented itself with verifying that the system did indeed generate a small amount of thrust, between 30 and 50 micro-Newtons. This is a tiny amount, only enough to levitate a mass of three to five milligrams (a few eyelashes) here on Earth; but, astonishingly, it is a net thrust nonetheless.

"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma," the study concludes.

The system has many striking similarities with the EmDrive, designed by British aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, although the explanation that Shawyer provides for the working mechanism is quite different from Fetta's or NASA's.

According to one peer-reviewed paper, the EmDrive thruster was able to produce 720 mN of thrust from an electricity input of 2.5 kW (Photo: EmDrive)

"At first sight the idea of propulsion without propellant seems impossible," says Shawyer. "However, the technology is firmly anchored in the basic laws of physics and following an extensive review process, no transgressions of these laws have been identified."

According to Shawyer, the thruster works because of relativistic effects: the microwaves are moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light at both ends of the resonator, and so, he claims, the resonator and the microwaves have two separate frames of reference, with the two forming an open system that ultimately doesn't violate the laws of physics, conservation of momentum included.

The interesting thing about EmDrive is that, back in 2009, a Chinese peer-reviewed journal tested Shawyer's thruster design, registering 720 mN of thrust at an input power of 2.5 kW. That's enough to make a tennis ball hover, and then some; in fact, if the results are confirmed, such levels of thrust would already be practical for satellitar applications.

Salient characteristics of the EmDrive compared to a more conventional ion propulsion system (Image: EmDrive)

The system could generate electricity from solar panels, and because it is much lighter than current thrusters, it could more than halve the weight launch of satellites, leading to very significant reductions in launch costs. A practical microwave thruster could also meaningfully extend the lifetime of satellites and pave the way for deep space robotic missions.

Even beyond that, Shawyer claims that the second generation of his fuel-less thrusters, based on superconductor technology, will be capable of producing an impressive specific thrust of 30 kN per kW of input energy. "Thus for 1 kilowatt (typical of the power in a microwave oven) a static thrust of 3 tonnes (3.3 tons) can be obtained, which is enough to support a large car. This is clearly adequate for terrestrial transport applications."

But before we start talking Sun-powered flying cars and weekend trips to Pluto, the scientific community will undoubtedly need to dissect the experiment with great care and independently verify whether the tiny net thrust reported by NASA could after all be attributed to some external cause that the researchers didn't account for.

Tourbillon 1000% brings 3D printing to watches ... sort of

The Tourbillon 1000%

Buying a mechanical watch with a finely-crafted tourbillon movement can set you back tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if you don’t mind one made out of plastic and a bit larger than usual, 3D printing may be the answer. Computer scientist and watchmaking enthusiast Nicholas Manousos has created a printable version of the famous watch movement called Tourbillon 1000%. Fabricated from thermoplastic and ball bearings, it may not be practical, but it's certainly eye catching.

The tourbillon movement was invented by French-Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1795 and patented in 1801. It counters the effects of gravity by encasing the balance wheel and escapement in a rotating cage, and is frequently shows up in upmarket mechanical watches – often designed to let the wearer admire the mechanism in action.

The 3D-printed version gets its name because it’s a 1000 percent scale model. The Tourbillon 1000% is a model of just the escapement rather than the entire watch movement, but needless to say, a plastic watch ten feet across is not exactly practical.

The result of three years work, the Tourbillon 1000% isn’t a practical time keeper either, because of plastic’s poor thermal properties. Instead, Manousos says that the purpose of the model is educational. “It allows people to hold the usually too delicate tourbillon in their hands, see clearly every single part at work, and therefore fully comprehend the mechanics.”

The Tourbillon 1000% was printed using a Delta Kinematics Robot with a 200-micron resolution. It’s made of additive layers of Polylactic acid (PLA), which is a biodegradable thermoplastic filament made from a cornstarch base. The only parts of the mechanism that aren’t printed are the ball bearings used instead of the jewels found in proper watch movements. Manousos says that he experimented with printed bearings using high-strength polymers, but concluded that ball bearings worked better.

The Tourbillon 1000% is available in a limited run with each bespoke piece made to order. Price is available on request from Manousos.

The video below introduces the Tourbillon 1000%.