The Smart Singapore

 

 

 

The world's only city island nation, Singapore, is well known for its cleanliness, greenery and also popular as a land of shopping malls, is now a new center for new high-tech innovation and the best substitute to Silicon Valley.

According to leading high tech industry, leaders it seems that they are already living in 2050. Singapore is known for its developed Information Technology infrastructure with strong government support and intellectual property laws. Singapore attracts like a magnet for world’s i.t industries from dyson to other high-tech giants such as facebook, google, linkedin and Microsoft.  The city-state has already become the most futuristic place on the planet in different technological areas.

In 2015 autonomous cars, the concept of a standalone car started in Singapore with the introduction of the world's first driverless taxi system. Since 2010, the Singapore National University of has been testing self-propelled golf buggies on its campus for the safety of this new transportation.

It was October 2014; when the national university of Singapore conducted the first ever public testing of self-propelled vehicles and has since upgraded its electric passenger vehicle which has only been approved for testing on public roads. One of the private companies of Singapore, named nuTonomy, who took first initiative in the country and also become the third applicant to receive approval for public road testing in the northern side of the country in April 2016.

One of the top universities in Singapore, Nanyang Technological University is also developing driverless city buses such transport is to be introduced in 2022. Last year in 2020, the whole western areas the country with the length of public roads more than 1000 miles became a testing ground for robocars.

The law enforcement agencies work their best that’s why, crime rate is very low in the country, and the police are actively introducing technology into their work, for their duty best they uses special drones for air searches. These special drones can reach heights of sixty meters, with powerful sirens and a searchlight. Uses of robots are normal especially on the ground space during public events and these bots are fully autonomous and use pre-planned routes for navigation. These bots are equipped with cameras and they allow for remote surveillance.

The city-state is totally amazing, you can see there smart homes this is a key element of country’s vision for the city of the future, eighty percent of the population lives in affordable apartments that the government supports. Many areas are initially equipped with smart sensors that they monitor different things like electricity water, vacuum waste management systems and solar panels for power generation are also beginning to be implemented.

Smart streets of Singapore, it’s nice to hear that streets are smarter; by installing light poles that can illuminate avenues as well as the technological future of the city. These new light poles lamps are equipped with sensors and analytical system. The sensors can monitor environment changes such as temperature, rainfall and humidity in addition they respond to loud sounds such as a scream or a car crash. Soon, facial recognition sensor install with lamps to ensure the street's safety.

Cashless payments and a digital state, the smart nation program implies comfort in every aspect of life, today people of Singapore can pay via QR codes in restaurants or retail stores using only their smartphones. Singapore has a national digital identification system and uses two-factor verification and can be used to access all government services.

 Today, Singapore is has been one of the world's leading financial hubs and is also now becoming increasingly a major technology hub. Top tech companies are penetrated there and seriously, it’ll be amaze to be there.

 

 

 

The Hulk Plane

 

It's a plane that would have never have been built today and it burns up to 20 tons of fuel an hour and it's too large for a third of the world's  airports. But this cold war relic was built to do what no other aircraft in the world could:  lift enormous components for the Soviet space program, and even launch rockets into orbit by serving as an air-launch stage. 

The Soviets had big plans for this plane, but by the time they unveiled it to the world at the 1989, Paris Air Show, it was a plane built for a future that would never be. The Soviet Union begins airlifting components of a new space launch system in 1982, strapping gigantic components to the back of aircraft, and flying them thousands of miles across the country. 

They're racing to build the counterpart to the American Space Shuttle, a rival spacecraft and launch system called Energia-Buran. Like earlier, Soviet spacecraft, it's being built here at aerospace manufacturing facilities in the west, and it'll be launched here thousands of kilometers away. But unlike earlier spacecraft, Energia-Buran components are too large to be transported using railways, so they'll have to be airlifted. In a rush the Soviets convert 1950s-era bombers for the job, but the planes aren't up to the task, they can only lift smaller components. To carry fully assembled components, some of which are nearly sixty meters long, the Soviets are going to need a much bigger plane.

Boeing 747s made it easy for the Americans to transport space shuttles into shuttle carriers. The jumbo jet was an ideal plane for the job, large and powerful it was modified by reducing weight, strengthening its fuselage, and adding additional stabilizers. And unlike the Soviets, the Americans would also use rail lines, and the largest components would be transported over water using barges and just the shuttle orbiter would need to be up by air lift.

Under development in the early 1980s, the Antonov 124 would enter service as the largest and most capable transport in the world, and just in time for Energia-Buran launches. But even the enormous 124 wasn't going to cut it, engineers would have to make the plane even larger and to do it, they'd increase the fuselage and add course extensions to increase the wingspan. 

For more power they'd give the plane two more engines, with strength in fuselage, the new plane would easily carry a Buran orbiter, but larger components would obstruct the tail. So engineers redesigned the vertical stabilizer. To deal with the new plane's immense weight and to prevent it from damaging runways, they'd give it a new landing gear: distributing weight across 32 wheels. Larger and more capable, this new titan of the skies would be designated the An-225 is unlike any aircraft in the world.

With 6 powerful turbofans put out 309,000 pounds of thrust giving it the capability to lift nearly double the burden of its western competitors and the main operation of that beast would be to carry Energia-Buran components, but engineers also planned using the plane to do what had never been done before. Launch spacecraft into orbit directly from mid-air. That's because the 225 would be powerful enough to fly a fully-fueled space plane and its load up to the lower stratosphere, where it would then launch at an altitude of eight kilometers. Allowing it to reach orbit at one-tenth the cost of launching from the ground, the reusable launch system would complement the Energia-Buran and its development was well started by 1988.

It’s November 1988, the Soviets astonished the world with the first unmanned takeoff of a Buran. Up until that point, few in the west would have had any idea that the Soviets had developed their own version of the Space Shuttle. And the following year the soviets gave western audiences a first-hand look as the enormous 225 carried a Buran to the Paris Air Show. The monstrous plane drew crowds, but experts were puzzled. To get to the air show, the Soviets had flown their brand new spacecraft right through a rainstorm. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine's Antonov Design Bureau struggled to find customers for their aircraft. An-124s having more lifting power than any aircraft in the world, Antonov found a brisk business transporting everything from giant electrical generators to locomotives. 

By the late 90s, the case for resurrecting the giant 225 was building but it wasn't a straightforward decision. Unlike the smaller 124 which was purpose built for cargo, the 225 was a relic of the Soviet space program, with a fuselage heavily reinforced to handle external payloads. And unlike the 124, the plane had no rear cargo door, which would slow the process of loading cargo and after many years in storage, 20 million dollars were financed into new engines, modernized avionics, and a new strengthened cargo hold. 

In January of 2002, the 225 take off its first flight with payload of 187 tons.  The world's largest plane had been given a new lease on life carrying cargo that would have otherwise been impossible to fly. And over the course of the next two decades, the 225 set new world records for the immense payloads it transported. But the plane's outsized capabilities come with outsized costs. At upwards of 30 thousand dollars an hour to operate, the 225 only flies when no other aircraft can do the job. But this beast is the one of the type ever produced, the hulk plane remains in a class of its own.

 

Japan's Travel - Faster than Flying

 

 

More than fifty years ago, Japan invented high-speed rail with iconic Bullet Trains that could operate at more than 200km per hour. The Bullet Train transformed Japan, and kick started a revolution in high-speed rail around the world. Once again, the Japanese are setting out to do it again and this time by building a new kind of train that will operate at an incredible 500km per hour.

The world's fastest train will connect Japan's two largest cities and it will be faster than flying. Covering the 400km distance in just 67 minutes but this is also one of the most expensive transport projects in history.

The first Bullet Trains started in 1964, Japanese engineers were already working on a radical new way of train, with cutting edge rail technologies, bullet trains could operate at speeds that no we can’t thought, while there was still plenty of room to get them to go even faster, engineers realized that at some point, trains would hit a speed limit. To go much extra ordinary fast and furious, they would need a new type of train. So, to eliminate rail friction, engineers would get rid of wheels altogether, instead use magnetic force to levitate the train inside a guide-way.

Although the solution seemed radical, the idea of magnetically levitating a train had been around since the early 1900's. Among early experiments with Maglevs (a system of train transportation that uses two sets of magnets), Germany and Japan, both of these invest heavily in unique versions of the technology. By the 1980's, prototype maglevs were making headlines, breaking speed records, and promising to revolutionize railways. But it would be more than twenty years before the first high-speed maglev would see commercial operation.

It wasn't until 2004, with the opening of the Shanghai Transrapid, that maglevs had finally overtaken conventional rail as the fastest trains in the world. On the line connecting Shanghai with its airport, maglevs based on Germany's technology routinely reach 430 km per hour.

There were once ambitious plans to build high-speed maglevs around the world with some even predicting that North America alone would see thousands of kilometers constructed by the 2020's but plans never materialized, the problem is Maglevs are expensive. Compared to conventional high-speed rail lines, they cost anywhere from 2 to 3 times more to build and they don't work with existing infrastructure.

The world's first intercity maglev line, being built by the Central Japan Railway Company, will connect the country's two largest cities. Just like the first Bullet Trains did in 1964, but today, where it takes two and a half hours for the fastest Bullet Trains to travel between Tokyo and Osaka, the new maglev line will gives you just sixty seven minutes.

The existing Shinkansen (bullet train) already carries nearly half a million passengers every single day. But with Bullet Trains often spaced just three minutes apart, it’s reaching its limit. The infrastructure of the bullet trains which is now almost more than fifty years old and the existing line also runs through the most earthquake prone regions of Japan.

The maglev line will instead take a more direct and straight route between the major cities through a much less seismically active mountain range and that means more than eighty percent of the line will run through tunnels, some of which will be more than twenty km long and a kilometer and a half below the surface. It’s expected that the first section will be open in 2027 with the remaining connection to Osaka completed a decade later.

Japan's high speed intercity maglevs will be the fastest way to travel between japan s major cities, even faster than flying. Making such eye-watering speeds possible is a technology that's been in development for over 50 years. It’s called SCMaglev (Superconducting). To levitate trains off their guide-way, electromagnets are cooled to extreme temperatures in order to take advantage of a phenomenon called superconductivity, which significantly increases magnetic force. The train's electromagnets interact with coils embedded inside a guide-way. One set of coils is used to propel the train while the other is for levitation and guidance. The second set of coils is unpowered. It means SCMaglevs must first accelerate on wheels to 150 km/h, before they can induce a magnetic field to levitate. But once up to speed, the trains are dynamically stable.

The trains are also fully autonomous, controlled not by a driver, but by the track, it means that the collisions are almost impossible and with three separate braking systems, they can also stop faster than conventional trains.

This project is already the most expensive in Japan’s history, much of it owing to the amount of tunneling required, but also the cost of building entirely new stations next to or below existing ones.

This is new train by Japanese straight out of the future and it will be the most ambitious implementation of maglev technology.