Heli Man —

Add/blend together Leonardo da Vinci, Igor Sikorsky, Rube Goldberg, and Eddie Merckx, and if you are very, very good and very lucky, you get something like this: AeroVelo Officially Awarded AHS Sikorsky Prize! Posted on July 11, 2013 by Cameron in Blog Great news! The American Helicopter Society has officially declared AeroVelo winner of the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered […]

Renewable power source search: Lobsters

Moving on to lobsters, the team that is systematically exploring different varieties (see detail in text, below) of renewable power sources: “From ‘cyborg’ lobsters to a pacemaker powered by implantable biofuel cells,” Kevin MacVittie, Jan Halamek, Lenka Halamkov, Mark Southcott, William D. Jemison, Robert Lobel and Evgeny Katz, Energy and Environmental Science, vol. 6, 2013.  The authors, […]

The powerful lack of power in Redding

This chart, created by The United Illuminating Company, shows how Connecticut cities and towns are still affected by the recent hurricane. It says that 110.34% of the electricity customers in the town of Redding are still without power. The United Illuminating Company’s web site says, in big letters, “WE ARE IN STORM MODE“. (Thanks to […]

Boos Act as Booze on the Power-Hungry

An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom. The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to […]

Appreciating organizational psychopaths

Psychopathology is a little-publicized branch of science. This monograph in particular received surprisingly little acclaim when it was published: “The Dark Side of Management Decisions: Organisational Psychopaths,” Clive Roland Boddy, Management Decision, vol. 44, no. 10, 2006, pp. 1461–75. [AIR 15:4] (Thanks to Martin Gardiner for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at Middlesex […]