This cheetah
This video shows a demonstration of the “Cheetah” robot galloping at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour (mph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set in 1989.
The robot’s movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.
Wake up and smell the bacon.
Joe Ayoob throws a John Collins design, officially breaking the world record by 19 feet, 6 inches.
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame.
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These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
A test shot fires from the Office of Naval Research-funded Electromagnetic Railgun prototype launcher located at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.
A story from a little over a year ago reported a 33 MegaJoule test. A blog post at Scientific American puts the design range at 20-32 MJ, so it seems the refinements are now in areas other than the energy (e.g. better efficiency, moving from a research device to a better-engineered on that can be deployed). That article also refines the expected range of the gun.
The Navy says that the railgun project, initiated in 2005, will yield a 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles (roughly 90 to 185 kilometers).
The story where I saw this calls the phenomenon “ground resonance”. While it looks and acts a lot like an unbalanced washing machine in the spin cycle, which doesn’t seem like a resonance phenomenon, from what I understand this can be caused by a shock to the system from landing, and the helicopter is susceptible at certain rotor speeds. If the compensation is 180º out of phase with the wobble you get positive feedback, so it makes sense that this could happen; you’d either want to speed up or slow down the rotor, were it safe and easy to do so, to change the feedback. But this happened pretty quickly.
FA-18 “Super Hornet” Owns the Sound Barrier