Finally, Someone made a Millennium Falcon Drone

 - Eric Geller - 

Drones have many practical uses, from surveying crop fields to filming movies to documenting climate change. But the best technology is part practical, part recreational. That's where the Millennium Falcon comes in.

Han Solo's heavily modified YT-1300 light freighter from the originalStar Wars trilogy is one of the most iconic spaceships in pop culture. It's no wonder, then, that a drone enthusiast named Olivier sought to combine the affordable power and speed of today's drones with the irresistible shape and design of the Millennium Falcon.

In a Reddit thread on the site's DIY forum, Olivier explained that he built the Falcon around a powerful quadcopter model. The quadcopter "is an overpowered little beast," he wrote, adding that it was "easily capable of 90km/h [56 miles per hour] horizontal speed." With his special customizations, however, that dropped to "probably about 30km/h," or 19 mph.

"If I try to go faster with more angle it's making a cool backflip," Olivier added.

The entire project cost just over 1,000 Euros, or $1,142, with the vast majority of that going into the quadcopter unit and its radio controller.

You can watch the radio-controlled Falcon's first two flights below.

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I found this particular article, along with its videos, to be very intriguing because drones are probably the most advanced equipment in the field of robotics and electronics. You always see the drones in the movies, but it is not everyday that you see one in person. The creation of this "Falcon Drone" made me excited because not only can you experience seeing one, but if you save enough of your allowance, you could potentially own one. I had the pleasure of controlling a different model over the summer. That particular model had a high resolution camera built into it and it was an absolute spectacle. The possibilities with drones are endless. They may very well be the FedEx of tomorrow.

Scale of the Universe Slowly Being Measured - Catherine Bennet

One of the most puzzling questions of all time is the question of whether the Universe could be measured or not. Basically, the universe is defined as the totality of everything that exists, has existed and ever will exist. The actual size of the Universe has been debated upon for years and years. Now, a team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances of galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1% accuracy-an unprecedented measurment. David Shlegal, physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a principal investigator of BOSS stated now that he knows the size of the universe better than he knows the size of his own house.

What the scientists did to achieve this amazing feat was that, they mapped the locations of 1.2 million galaxies and found that their new measurments support the ideas of a "cosmological constant", an idea first proposed by Albert Einstein. The cosmological constant measures the energy density in the vacuum of space. Dark energy, which is said to be the driving force of the Universe's constant expansion, has stayed the same ever since the universe began with the Big Bang. The ultra-presice new galaxy map that the researchers have formulated has said to unlock the new found potentials of dark energy. 

Part of the Galaxy map that the survey has formulated 

A new result at the 223rd meeting of the BOSS team revealed that the curvature of space was not what they had thought. In basic terms, the universe is quite "flat", now suggesting that the universe is infinite, and would continue forever in time. So what they could conclude, is that since the universe is flat, it would infact be infinite, because the results of the survey are consistent with the theory of a finite universe.

The BOSS uses a spectograph to add more stars, to slowly but precisely add on to whatever measure they have found. On a clear night, their 2.5 meter telescope situated in New Mexico can pick up 8000 new galaxies and quasers to add on to the ever expanding galaxy map. They double the size of the measured area, and add on to the new galaxies they have found, leading to more precise results. Making the measurments at two different distances helps the surveyers actually understand more about the size and the expansion of the universe. Dark energy and its opposite force, Dark matter are now being taken seriously, as they help people find out more about the Final frontier...Space.

Citation: http://www.livescience.com/42457-dark-energy-galaxy-map-aas223.html