The Electric Airplane Is Coming 187
An anonymous reader writes "The electric car is so yesterday; electric airplanes are coming. A battery electric-powered ultralight aircraft has been flying for the last year. A series-hybrid motor glider and a concept for an all-electric, 50-seat passenger plane were introduced at the Paris Air Show."
Re:LOL (Score:4, Informative)
Don't be dumb; there's an infinite number of molecules out there that can be made from the elements on the periodic table. For instance, carbon nanotubes have only been discovered relatively recently, and have all kinds of interesting and useful properties, yet carbon the element has been known since ancient times, and is probably one of the first elements named and understood by scientists when they first invented chemistry. More recently, it's been discovered that you can make nanotubes with boron and boron nitride, which have very different properties from the carbon variety (BN tubes are insulators, whereas carbon tubes are conductors).
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13143-boron-nanotubes-could-outperform-carbon.html [newscientist.com]
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's an untold number of "metamaterials" out there waiting to be discovered, things which don't occur in nature in any significant quantity, have all kinds of amazing properties, and are made from simple elements that we've known about for ages (boron and nitrogen aren't exactly new discoveries).
Re:SMES (Score:5, Informative)
When you start using units like 'megawatts per hour' to describe energy, nothing else you say engineering related has any credibility.
Huh? When you're talking about electricity *storage* you have to say how long a device can supply the stated power for.
Methinks YOU'RE the one who just dashed your credibility on the rocks of /.
Try megawatt x hours, not megawatts/hour. Using the wrong units hinders your credibility.