Sail
Genius or lunacy? BMW Oracle Racing team set to wing it for the 2010 America's Cup
By Loz Blain
13:38 January 20, 2010 PST

America's team BMW Oracle Racing (BOR) has taken full advantage of a "wide open" set of design rules for this year's America's Cup to produce one of the most staggering and ambitious vessels ever seen on the water. Throwing out the cloth main sail, team BOR have fitted the BOR 90 with a gargantuan, motorized, solid carbon-fiber wing, nearly twice the size of a Boeing 747 wing at 190ft, or 57 metres tall. The engineering and logistics surrounding this incredible boat are mind-boggling - imagine trying to work out where to store the giant wing structure, how to transport it and how to fix it vertically onto a boat - let alone how to sail the thing - but the benefits of a non-deforming main sail include the potential for the multimillion-dollar trimaran to travel at up to 2.5 times wind speed. It's a crazy, massively expensive and hugely risky experiment that's never even been prototyped, and will only get a few weeks' worth of testing before it races in February. Read More
Oasis of the Seas – world’s largest cruise liner sets sail this month
By Paul Lester
18:59 November 2, 2009 PST

Last year we introduced “Project Genesis”, the world’s largest and most expensive ocean liner. After a total of six years in the making, owner Royal Caribbean has now taken delivery of this 16 deck, 225,282 ton floating city which features 2,700 staterooms and can carry 5,400 guests. Now officially called “Oasis of the Seas”, the ship sailed from Turku, Finland on Friday, October 30 en route to her home port of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a U.S. debut on Wednesday, November 11. Read More
Space sail to take out the trash
By Darren Quick
12:47 April 26, 2009 PDT

We’ve recently examined the danger posed to future space missions by the ever increasing collection of space junk orbiting the Earth. Now a plan by a pair of space engineers to use a sail to take out the trash – or rather, bring it back to Earth – may help to stop future space missions adding to the problem of space junk. Read More















Mr Stiffy
- February 9, 2010 @ 06:26 UTC