You Can Buy One of the Super Rare DeLorean Time Machines Used in Back to the Future [Back To The Future]

By Casey Chan Oct 16, 2011 6:00 PM 14,618 24

Profiles in History is auctioning off over a 100 Back to the Future props but the one that's got me—and about the entire rest of the world—shaking in my boots is the DeLorean used in BTTF III. It's one of only seven DeLoreans used throughout the entire series.

The DeLorean being auctioned off is the one that Marty McFly "used in the 1955 drive-in movie scene when Michael J. Fox drives it into the past and lands in 1885 to find Doc". The auction house says it's one of only three to have survived after filming. I've always said when I could afford a DeLorean, I was going to buy one but... I can't afford this one. The BTTF III DeLorean is expected to fetch $600,000. Gulp.

I guess I'll have to look past the DeLorean and check out the other stuff which ranges from "original costumes, the Tales From Space comic, Doc's burned toy Cadillac, Clock Tower cables, Gray's Almanac, the Doc Brown committed/commended newspapers" and drum roll please: a full set of all five types of hoverboards. Hoverboards, you are mine. The auction starts in December so I'll be saving every penny until then. [Profiles in History via LA Times]

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How to Roll a 340-Ton Boulder Through the Streets of Los Angeles [Monster Machines]

By Andrew Tarantola Oct 12, 2011 11:30 AM 5,014 18

How does one move 680,000 pounds of solid granite from a quarry in Riverside county, through some of the busiest streets in the country, to the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art? This mammoth trailer is certainly a start.

Michael Heizer pioneered the Land Art movement—one that expresses its art through landscape design. His latest project, Levitated Mass, involves situating a 340-ton granite boulder atop a 15-foot deep, 456-foot long trench on the LACMA grounds so as to appear almost floating when viewed from below.

The problem is LACMA's roughly 60 miles away from the Stone Valley Quarry where the rock is located, and it's a HUGE rock—one single piece of granite, 21 feet tall.

The installation project actually began five years ago when the boulder was blasted out of the surrounding bedrock—it has simply just taken this long to slog through the bureaucratic morass of Southern California's various cities, counties, and unincorporated townships. The move is expected to take place on October 17th and is being handled by Emmert International, a heavy moving company that helped move the Hubble before it launched.

Since the rock is so enormous, it has to be first jacked up using hydraulic lifts before being set in a steel-trussed "cradle" that rests upon a modular tractor with 22 axles, each with its own set of brakes—a total of 196 wheels. With the rock, the tractor tips the scales at 1,210,900 pounds. This weight is evenly distributed among the axles, reducing the load each bears to about 349,950 pounds.

The tractor itself measures 295 feet long by 27 feet wide—nearly three lane's worth—and requires a crew of 12 to operate. In order to make turns, the massive trailer acts similarly to a caterpillar, with the front of the rig moving independently from the rear. And while the trip is 60 miles as the crow flies, the quality of LA's infrastructure necessitates numerous bypasses to avoid weak roads and bridges, making the total mileage nearly 85 miles. And, given that the trailer can only travel about 10 miles an hour, its journey will take close to ten days, rather than the average 90 minutes, to complete.

The total cost is estimated to be just under $10 million, though Govan is coy as to the total price of the permanent installation. He says it's in "single digit millions, more than five and less than 10." Luckily, most of the cost of producing this artwork has been paid through a combination of private and corporate donors including Terry and Jane Semel, Robert Daly and Carole Bayer, and Hanjin Shipping - a Korean shipping company. The exhibit is expected to open mid-November, permits willing.

[New York Times - LA Times - LACMA - Top art courtesy of Monica Almeida / The New York Times]

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Larry Ellison's Sail Boat Is Literally Faster than the Wind [Monster Machines]

By Andrew Tarantola Oct 10, 2011 11:30 AM 8,701 17

Oracle founder Larry Ellison takes his boat racing very seriously. His team's entry in last year's America's Cup, the USA-17, is actually capable of sailing faster than the prevailing wind. And not just by a little bit—2.5 times faster.

USA-17 is the specially-built sloop rigged racing sail trimaran (a catamaran with three hulls) launched by the BMW Oracle Racing team that won the 33rd America's Cup. It's 90 feet long square at the waterline—about the size of a baseball infield—and displaces 17 tons of water. The USA -17 was designed by VPLP Yacht Design and is constructed primarily out of carbon fiber composite. This makes her exceptionally light and fast for her size. When travelling downwind with a 5-10 knot winds in last year's America's Cup, the USA-17 was recorded rocketing along at an astonishing 19 knots.

The hulls are constructed from millimeter-thick carbon epoxy laminated around an ultra-light honeycomb core and then baked in a vacuum chamber within a massive oven for eight hours at 80 degrees Celsius. This results in a hull that is exceptionally strong, stiff, and most importantly, light. And it's got to be—tight turns can generate as much as 15 tons of torque on the hull.

It's also designed to cut through waves. The USA-17 has a very narrow bow that's much less buoyant than the rear of the ship. This forces the hull through, rather than over, the wave which results in a smoother ride and reduces the ship's resistance through the water.

The USA-17 is propelled by its massive 223-foot tall, 7,700 pound main wing that's attached a 3.5-ton carbon fiber and Kevlar mast. It's taller than the Statue of Liberty and larger than any plane wing in existence. This airfoil works just like a plane's wing, except that it produces horizontal thrust rather than vertical.

The amount of curve in the wing determines how much lift it produces. The mast rotates to control the angle of the wing while nine, two-story tall trailing wing flaps can be independently angled to adjust the wing's overall curve. These trailing wings form a slotted flap when deflected, much like the flaps on an airplane's wing which produces more thrust than earlier wingmast/sail combinations. In addition, these flaps can be adjusted to maximize the lift on the wing near the base of the mast and lessening higher up to produce lots of power without a lot of heeling force (which is what causes boats to flip).

In addition, her sails—the mainsail, headsail, and gennaker—have a massive combined surface area of nearly 22,000 square feet.

All of this design means there're lots of parts that can break. To monitor the stresses and loads placed upon the boat as the crew trains and races, 250 sensors located throughout the hull, mast and sails, beam real-time data to a PDA on the skipper's wrist.

[New York Times - America's Cup - Wikipedia - Tom Speer]

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How To Raise Four Million Pounds of Fish a Year—in Virginia [Monster Machines]

The demand for seafood in America is booming, to be sure—unfortunately, the ocean's fish stocks aren't exactly doing the same. So how does one meet this overwhelming demand for meat? Farming fish, obviously. Lots of them.

Recirculating Aquaculture, How Does It Work?

Recirculating Aquaculture is a four-step system, starting in the grow-out tanks that house the fish population. Water is continually pumped through these tanks, introducing food and carrying away waste. Once water exits the tanks, it's first mechanically filtered, whereby fecal matter and food particles are removed. The water is then cycled past beneficial bacterial cultures that convert the ammonia present in the water to harmless nitrogen vapor that's released into the atmosphere. Before being pumped back into the tanks, the water undergoes oxygenation by having pure O2 pumped into the flow and any carbon dioxide removed.

The accumulated waste can then be reused—often, as an aquaponic fertilizer (which conveniently filters the water for reuse) or in methane digesters to generate electricity. There is even research underway in using the waste for bio-fuel production. By continuously filtering the fouled water and reintroducing the clean, RA systems are able to raise large amounts of fish with minimal "water footprints." For example, BRA is able to continuously recycle about 99.75 percent of the water flowing through its 100,000 square foot facility.

Having a small footprint is a boon to the burgeoning inland aquaculture industry for both fresh and salt-water species. BRA's complex sits on just 2.5 acres of land but raises four million pounds of tilapia protein each year—that's between 10,00 and 20,000 pounds a day. If they were raising cattle on the same acreage, they'd produce maybe 10,000 pounds in the same period.

BRA, for example, raises its Tilapia from proprietary brood stock, harvesting 400,000 to 500,000 eggs every week. When the Tilapia hatch, the fry are first raised in a series of nursery tanks before being transferred to one of the facility's 42, 35,000-gallon grow-out tanks with the rest of the population. Through the larval and juvenile stages, and until they're nine months later when they weigh 1.5 pounds, they exist in an entirely closed system. The kicker is that each fish lives on just 1.5 gallons of water apiece—that's a lot of fish for such a small area. If you packed cattle into conditions like that, you'd have to pump them full of antibiotics and growth hormones to overcome their physiological response to the over-crowding—but not with tilapia. Packing them in like Sardines actually makes the fish less aggressive, less territorial, and even improves their growth rate. And by maintaining this closed system, the fish remain free of industrial pollutants and other nasty things—like Mercury—that's found in wild populations.

This closed system also offers significant benefits over the current offshore aquaculture "net pen" farms used to raise salt water species. Basically, their super-concentrated populations tend to release super-concentrated waste—the equivalent to dumping the raw sewage from a town of several thousand directly offshore. In addition, these fish are not only more prone to infection from their over-crowded conditions, they're more likely to spread these afflictions to neighboring wild species.

Recirculating aquaculture was initially created specifically with fresh-water species in mind, recent advancements are showing promise in raising certain saltwater species in the same fashion. The secret is to use very low salinity water. Typical net pens have a salinity of 35 parts per thousand, however Australian RAS firms have successfully raised both Pompano and Combia (both rather expensive when raised offshore or caught from wild stock) in tanks with a salinity of only five ppt. This has obvious benefits for both the RAS industry and the environment itself—resulting in a wider selection of fish to raise while virtually eliminating the waste, disease, and nutrient runoff issues present in offshore farms. And while these systems aren't ready for commercialization just yet—researchers still need to tack down every aspect of the fish's life cycle from the optimal temperature to maximize hatching to the proper amount of dissolved nitrogen necessary, to the best food to feed at each stage of life—this technique promises major benefits over current methods.

[USDA - Blue Ridge Aquaculture - Lancaster Farming - Blue Ridge Aquaculture.pdf - Wikipedia - CS Monitor - Top Image: AP Images]

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Manspresso Machines, Spotify Hacks, and Other Stories We Didn't Post [Left Behind]

So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn't possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn't worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case.

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How New York City Built a Massive $3.8 Billion Underground Transit Station in the WTC's Footprints [Monster Machines]

The original World Trade Center PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) Station, opened in 1971, was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks when the WTC towers collapsed on top of it. Its replacement, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, is a mega-terminal on the scale of Grand Central Station—under the new WTC complex.

"The Financial District used to be, at some point, part of the Hudson. We are in a lot of landfill area; Battery Park Station and the World Financial Center are built on landfill," Eduardo DelValle, Director of Design Management for 1 World Trade Center told us. "This whole 16 acres is walled in by slurry walls, and they're designed to keep the Hudson from coming in because the water table here is very, very high. Within two feet [of digging down from street level] we're hitting water."

The slurry wall or "bathtub" method involves digging a trench and filling the resulting space with a mixture of bentonite and water, which temporarily plugs holes and keeps groundwater from penetrating. When the trench is completed, workers insert a steel cage into the trench and pump in concrete, which forces the slurry mix out, resulting in a water-tight retaining wall.

When the WTC towers fell, many of the floor slabs that supported the original slurry wall were knocked out, leaving just the debris pile itself to keep the wall from collapsing. As excavations of "The Pile" commenced, the wall's support structure was removed and, over time, due to the intense water pressure exerted by the Hudson, sections of the wall ended up shifting as much as a foot inward and caused a massive crack to form in one section of the slurry wall—leaking of anywhere from 100-200 gallons per minute in places.

Work crews immediately back-filled huge amounts of soil to bolster the wall. They then plugged the leaks by pushing rope treated with an expanding chemical into the holes and stopped the wall from further cracking by pumping in a strong sealing paste. Workers also excavated a series of wells outside the wall to lower the groundwater level, thereby reducing pressure outside of the wall. Intruding water was summarily pumped out.

The new slurry wall being built around the 16-acre WTC complex not only provides protection from the Hudson's waters but also acts as a foundation for the new transportation hub's lower floors. Its three-foot thick walls extend 70—100 feet into the Earth, pass within six feet of the new train tunnels and are anchored into the bedrock with approximately 1,000 cable tie-backs.

It did, however, suffer similar water intrusion damage with Hurricane Irene. "Water was just gushing in," said DelValle. Since the original wall's structural integrity had been repeatedly compromised, the WTC design team determined that a second layer of protection was necessary, "so what we're doing is putting in liner walls," DelValle continued, "which is a another slurry wall in front of the old, providing another layer of protection."

When you think of an underground transportation facility, the image of a child's hands releasing a bird into flight shouldn't be the first think you think of—third, maybe, after Mole Men and Crab People—but that is exactly what famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava based the new canopy cover of the Transportation Hub on.

The Hub entrance—aka the Oculus—is comprised of 300 pieces of steel erected in a rare, Vierendeel Truss design that features a pair of 150-foot-high "wings" suspended over a glass and steel "body"—built from two sets of specially-designed arches, each weighing between 10-25 tons and standing over 30 feet tall—that allows natural light to penetrate to the rail platforms more than 60 feet below street level. The steel beams were manufactured numerous locations including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Canada and Spain.

"The building is built with steel, glass, and light. They will all be equal building materials," says Calatrava in a press release. "The light will arrive at the platform, and visitors will feel like they are arriving in a great place, a welcoming place."

The deck-over construction method was employed to ensure that the Memorial Plaza would be ready for the upcoming 10th anniversary of the attacks and 9/11 Memorial opening. The station itself is expected to open by mid-2014, according to the Port Authority.

Lower Manhattan is set to become the third-largest transportation center in New York when the World Trade Center Transportation Hub is completed.

It will house the PATH lines, 13 subway lines via the Fulton Street Transit Center through the Dey Street Corridor, and link visitors and locals alike to the World Financial Center through the most integrated network of underground pedestrian connections in all of New York City. In total, pedestrians will be able to access the Battery Park City Ferry Terminal to the WTC Memorial, Towers 1, 2, 3, and 4 as well as the Hudson River ferry terminals, the World Financial Center, and the proposed rail link to JFK Airport from the same central hub.

Located near the northeast corner of the WTC site between Towers 2 and 3, the Hub itself will be 300,000 sq. ft. and include a multi-story central hall that includes a lower concourse with balcony walkway above it (a la Grand Central Station) as well as a public waiting area and 500,000 sq. ft. of retail and dining space. It will be able to accommodate many as 250,000 riders a day—compared to the paltry 50,000 the temporary station currently can handle—as well as the millions of annual visitors to the new World Trade Center complex and 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

The entire Transportation Hub interior will be generally free of vertical columns, on account of the two massive plate girders—each 7 feet high and 143 feet long—that sit atop four super-columns, resulting in a greater sense of openness through the concourse. It will also feature three full-service, climate-controlled, 10-car platforms with five tracks, in addition to an additional platform to accommodate any future service lines.

In all, the Hub will consume over 22,000 tons of steel—roughly as much as the USS New York—in its construction. It's being financed via $1.92 billion from the Federal Transportation Agency with the Port Authority picking up the rest of the bill. The Hub promises to revolutionize how New Yorkers access Lower Manhattan and the greater NYC area.

Oculus image courtesy of NY/NJ Port Authority

Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.

A civilization can distinguish itself by how well it responds to disaster, and 10 years later, 9/11 is as much a story about recovery and rebuilding as it a story of terrible loss and tragedy. As a nation, our political and economic response has been imperfect—possibly even dead wrong—but we're focusing on the mechanical marvels that have helped us bounce back.

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The World's Most Accurate Clock. Ever. [Monster Machines]

138 Million years. That's how long it's been since dinosaurs first appeared on Earth. And how long it'll take for this clock to lose a second.

The clock, dubbed the NPL-CsF2 (sexy, right?), is one of an elite class of cesium fountain clocks that's used by Europe, the US, and Japan as the primary frequency standard. This standard is used to obtain an International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time—-both of which are employed in the communications and finance industries as well as for satellite navigation.

It stands just over eight feet tall and tosses cesium-33 atoms through a tunable microwave cavity and measures the number of oscillations as the cesium atoms transition between two energy levels—9,192,631,770 cycles being one second, according to the International System of Units. The external cylinder protects the fountain mechanism from external magnetic fields.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain, the previous record holder—it only loses a second once every hundred million years or so. As Io9 points out, this loss is due to the fact that "over time, background photons will cause the energy levels in the aluminum ions to shift around a bit, which makes the frequency shift around a bit. Since physicists can't adjust for that variance, they can't maintain the accuracy of the clock."

For the cesium fountain, NPL scientists took into account all phenomena known to shift the clock's frequency—from external elecromagnetic fields and atomic collisions, to the Doppler effect and microwave-lensing—that might affect clock's function. This attention to detail is what Krzysztof Szymaniec, the leader of the project, credits for the clock's extreme accuracy.

[CNET - BBC - National Physics Lab - Science Codex - Paleontology]

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Scientists Sail Among the Tree-Tops With This Canopy Raft [Monster Machines]

Exploration of forest canopies is no easy task—since researchers can't cross between tree-tops, they have to clamber up trunks, explore, descend, and then climb the next. Or they did, until the advent of the SolVin Bretzel Canopy Raft.

A canopy raft is, basically, an inflatable PVC pontoon frame with high-tension netting spread between. They're pre-inflated and lifted into positioned via airship, dirigible, or helicopter. Once in position, the rafts are set down among the tree-tops, allowing researchers unfettered access to the uppermost reaches of the forest ecosystem. Scientists can observe from the raft, rappel from it too—they can even live on its temporary floor for several days at a time.

The pretzel shape of the raft in the top image is known as a SolVin Bretzel, created by architect Gilles Ebersolt (yes, like "Pretzel" but in German), a recent design that replaced the previous, octagonal raft shape. Its unique 400m² area offers numerous advantages over its predecessors. It's a more structurally sound platform that maximizes surface area, preventing any outlying section from folding or collapsing. It's also extremely lightweight—meaning it doesn't crush the new growth of the canopy upon which it rests.

[Neat-O-Rama - Solva Plastics - Radeau Des Cimes - Gadling - Gilles Bersolt Designs (.pdf)]

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