Airbus announced a few weeks ago some sad news: no more A340 will be built, the program is dead, the A340 is no more – well there is still a couple of hundreds of A340 that will be flying for years all around the world but the A340 won’t be sold new anymore. Beside a few business configurated A340, no [...]

We talked about the Airbus A320 NEO family a while ago, the program is already a huge success, Airbus now recorded more than a 1 000 orders for A319, A320 or A321 NEO. The summit of that recent success being the 2011 Bourget Paris Air Show, where clients like Air Asia finalized big deals. This is now obvious that the [...]

Universities are like butterflies or snowflakes. One of the very enjoyable aspects of being a proud science nerd is to be able to read about so many different universities doing so many different things. Yeah yeah yeah, Harvard got Facebook, but let’s talk about a little more than Ivy Leagues ok?

When I first received that invitation I was quite curious: Saint-Gobain Solar – the main French corporate in the business – has rebuilt an old church’s roof with solar tiles. What? I had to go there and see it myself. I knew that some companies were selling solar tiles, but I never saw any on an actual building and on [...]

2 days ago I flew to Toulouse, 4 days ago I was in Bordeaux. Those 2 cities are Airbus’ fields – especially Toulouse. When You arrive at Toulouse Blagnac – airport – You can see on the opposite side Airbus’ hangars, with A330s, A340s and A380s which are about to be delivered and are tested. I have to say that I’ve [...]

Usually, if someone suffers from diabetes later on in life, it’s somehow linked to how much time their ass spends in a chair and how many cheesecakes, hamburgers, fries and tacos hang out in their intestines. Discovery provides a new take on this: air pollution. A new study points out the presence of a strong link between all the particles [...]

I love concrete, it runs in my family for 3 generations now (maybe it will be over after me though, who knows). So when I see a building with walls made of pure concrete, I am usually interested. Well the building that I will talk about today is more than a “building made of  concrete”. The EDF’s (Electricity of France) archives [...]

Alright, I will admit it: I hate Apple. I’ve owned an iPhone during 6 months, right, but i got rid of it quickly and switched to Android and a N1 – I couldn’t take the iPhone’s bad reception anymore – and I have owned an iPod classic for 3 years now. But I can’t stand Mac OS and Macs make [...]

I was talking the other day about researches which aimed to create building with skin-like walls. Well today I will talk about a “spider web” – a flexible mesh actually – which could envelop aircrafts and a tone of other facilities/machines. This is pretty simple: some researchers from Standford designed a skin – inspired by spiders’ webs – that could be [...]

Imagine buildings with exterior walls acting like skin and react to their environment: which retract when it’s cold, if it’s glass it could block – or not – light and heat, … That’s what teams of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania are working on – or are thinking about. The goal would be to make buildings’ skins sensing and react to some [...]