Silence in the sky: The latest, most advanced jet engines have seemingly simple zigzags cut around the metal exhaust nozzle to control noise. Now, researchers are trying to replace it with an aircraft mute button.
Ohio State University professors Mohammad Samimy and Igor Adamovich have shown that they can change the patterns of exhaust turbulence – one of the main causes of aircraft noise – with high-voltage electric current.
Unlike the metal cutouts, the current can be switched off when noise reduction isn’t needed, saving fuel, researchers say.
“When you’re up six miles in the air, you don’t care how much noise you’re making,” said Joseph Grady, project manager for engine noise reduction at NASA Glenn Research Center.
Commercial aircraft today are four times quieter than they were in the 1970s, and Cleveland-based NASA Glenn is sponsoring several studies with a goal of halving the noise heard around airports by 2008 and cutting it in half again by 2020.
Samimy’s research, supported by $100,000 from NASA, is one of four or five ideas being considered for the longer-term goal, Grady said. The next step is taking it from lab simulation to testing on a scale model engine and then the real thing.
Alert issued for misuse of portable music players: Companies beware: Critical corporate data might be dancing out of the office with workers who bring their iPods to work.
The research firm Gartner Inc. warns of security risks posed by the popular music player and other portable storage devices that plug into a PC’s USB or FireWire ports. The iPod, like the rest, can hold data in addition to tunes.
“Businesses are increasingly putting themselves at risk by allowing the unauthorized and uncontrolled use of portable storage devices,” Gartner analyst Ruggero Contu wrote.
The problem, he says, is twofold. In one scenario, employees could simply drag and drop sensitive files into the devices, which often come with gigabytes of storage capacity. In the other, the devices could carry a virus, Trojan horse or other malicious software.
The solution?
“Companies should forbid the use of uncontrolled, privately owned devices with corporate PCs,” Contu said.
Prohibition isn’t the only way to mitigate risk, however.
Bosses also can educate employees, create policies and protect data with encryption. There are also programs available, including an offering from SecureWave, that limit use of a PC’s USB ports to authorized devices.
BBC venturing away from the news, study says: A U.K. government report suggests that the British Broadcasting Corp. drop some features from its popular Web site to better concentrate on news.
The review, commissioned by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, also calls for outside contractors to provide a quarter of the site’s non-news content by 2006.
Philip Graf, the author of the review, said some BBC features – including fantasy football, games and entertainment listings – differed little from those of commercial competitors or were only faintly associated with the BBC’s commitment to public service.
The BBC, whose Internet activities have been strongly criticized by commercial publishers, was given until October to respond. But the corporation said it had already closed some sites and planned to shut down five more.
Associated Press
Associated Press
A General Electric jet engine is outfitted with a saw-tooth pattern nozzle. Researchers can change the patterns of exhaust turbulence, the main cause of noise, with high-voltage electric current in lab simulations.
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