A snippet from an abstract I'm working on - further details about 'falling up': Although they have many advantages over present technology, eddy-current actuators are not a killer app for generating 6-degree-of-freedom forces. Eddy-current forces are small and drop off quickly with distance. The necessary electromagnets and motors both generate... [Read More]

Whenever I explain my research, the conversation goes something like Me: "I'm working on a concept for a contact-less spacecraft actuator" Them: "A what?" Me: "*sigh* I'm trying to make a tractor beam." That, combined with our lab's youtube videos being listed along with the perpetual motion machines always makes... [Read More]

Have you ever gone through the Wikipedia disambiguation pages for the greek and Roman characters? If not, you should. Even if you narrow your scope to just a single discipline like Mechanical Engineering, the same symbol can mean multiple things (G can be both the gravitational constant and electrical conductance.)... [Read More]

Space: the final frontier. Every new frontier has a new set of rules - things that don’t work the way they did back home. The stars are different in the southern Hemisphere, the most deadly animal in the tropics is the mosquito, and dogs are more useful than mules in... [Read More]

Discussing eddy-current actuators is hard without the word ‘actuator.’ It is clunky and reeks of jargon, but the alternatives are worse. “Tractor Beam” is evocative but misleading. “Electromagnetic force generator” is so generic it says almost nothing. “Eddy-current force generator” begins to stray into the land of sleep-inducing engineering names... [Read More]