- I can’t stand the birds twittering right outside my window for the past hour. Argh! I didn’t even follow them. #
Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.
Joshua Klein: The amazing intelligence of crows
Saw this in a magazine. Birds have been nothing but trouble to the aviation industry. Dreamliner is tested and found bird-proof.
For your safety, a bird has been shot into this engine
One of the safety bar of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner jet engine, the General Electric GEnx, is to pass the Federal Aviation Administration’s “bird strike” test. To perform the test, technicians at GE’s testing facility in Peebles, Ohio, suspended the engine from a giant stand, its turbines spinning at full force. Then they loaded four thawed goose carcasses into a 50-foot-long steel tube and fired. Together, the birds shot at 205 miles an hour toward the blades of the engine, which tore them to pieces. Not one of the front fan blades broke. The GEnx engine passed the test.
According to the Bird Strike Committee USA, collisions with birds have caused more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage worldwide to civil aircraft every year. (more…)