Auto shows aren't just about the cars--the celebrities, booth models, industry heads and quirky press all help make to make it a memorable, if not chaotic, spectacle. Here are thehighlights from the 2013 New York Auto Show.     |
Auto Show Extras of the 2013 New York Auto Show
iPad Survives Ride Lodged in Car's Bumper
 A 23-year-old recent college graduate from Georgia may have just unintentionally had a role in the best commercial for Apple's iPad. Alexa Crisa, of Marietta, Ga., drove for nearly one hour with a stranger's iPad wedged in the bumper of her Nissan Sentra after the device flew off the roof of another car, bounced onto the roadway and into her car's bumper. "I went to Target and ran errands with this iPad hanging out of my bumper. I had no clue," Crisa told ABCNews.com. "I'm not even sure how I missed it other than I don't check my bumper for random dislodged electronics." Crisa was driving last Friday on a residential road in Marietta when another car pulled in front of her. She saw something fly off the car's roof and instinctively hit the brakes of her own car, bracing for impact, but then felt nothing. It was only after she was back home that she discovered the errant iPad, thanks to her dad. "My dad came in and said, 'Why is there an iPad in your car,'" Crisa recalled. "I got scared and said, 'Did someone throw something in the sunroof of my car,' and he said, 'No, there's an iPad in the bumper of your car.'" Crisa raced outside to see for herself that there was, in fact, an iPad lodged in her car. She took a photo because she knew it would be too unreal for anyone she told to believe and posted the photo to her Facebook page, where it spread online and has now been viewed more than two million times.
Crisa's dad, Nick, dislodged the iPad using a hammer and, perhaps the most unreal of all, the iPad still worked and, apart from broken glass on the front, was hardly damaged. "It was so remarkable that it was thrown from the roof of the car at 40 mph and still looked like that," she said. "It looked like nothing had happened to the back of the iPad." The iPad's owner had smartly locked his home screen but it left Crisa unable to track him down. On Sunday, after an unsuccessful trip to the Apple store where employees were amazed to hear her story but unable to release the owner's information, a phone number appeared on the home screen. "The owner used the 'Find my iPhone' app so his number popped up," Crisa said. "I was scared to call him thinking he wouldn't believe me but we had a good laugh." When they met on Monday to return the device, the iPad's owner, who does not want to be identified, told Crisa he'd left his wallet and iPad on the roof of his car. He found his wallet in his driveway and, eventually, now, his iPad in Crisa's bumper. The iPad owner got a new iPad through his Apple warranty plan and has offered to pay for the new bumper Crisa now needs for her car. Crisa describes herself as "Apple-less" when it comes to her own technology profile but says this experience may just drive her to purchase an iPhone herself. "Now that I have seen this, if they make iPhones as durable as iPads," she said. "But I'm not the one dropping them. I'm just catching them." |
Nuclear Fusion Rocket Could Reach Mars in 30 Days
Nuclear fusion, the energy source that fuels the sun and other active stars, could one day propel rockets that allow humans to go to Mars and back in 30 days, researchers say. Fusion-powered rockets promise to solve problems of deep-space travel that have long plagued plans for manned missions to Mars — long journeys, high costs and health risks, among them. Scientists at the University of Washington and a space-propulsion company named MSNW say they are getting to closer to creating a feasible fuel for travel to other planets. "Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, said in a statement. "We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace." Previous estimates have found that a roundtrip manned mission to Mars would require about 500 days of space travel. Slough, who is president of MSNW, and his colleagues calculated that a rocketpowered by fusion would make 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars possible. The project is funded in part through NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program and received a second round of funding under the program in March. For comparison, past NASA studies have centered on Mars flights that would take two years to complete, and could cost $12 billion just to launch the fuel needed for the mission, according to Slough's team. Nuclear fusion occurs when the nuclei of two or more atoms combine, resulting in a release of energy. The sun and other stars convert this energy into light, and the same process gives hydrogen bombs their destructive power. But to use fusion to power a manned spacecraft, a more controlled process is needed. Lab tests by Slough and his team suggest that nuclear fusion could occur by compressing a specially developed type of plasma to high pressure with a magnetic field. A sand-grain-sized bit of this material would have the same amount of energy as current rocket fuel, the team says. To get this fuel to propel a rocket to Mars, the team says a powerful magnetic field could be used to cause large metal rings (likely made of lithium) to collapse around the plasma material, compressing it to a fusion state, but only for a few microseconds. Energy from these quick fusion reactions would heat up and ionize the shell of metal formed by the crushed rings. The hot, ionized metal would be shot out of the rocket nozzle at a high speed. Repeating this process roughly every minute would propel the spacecraft, the researchers say. Slough said the design is fairly straightforward. The next step of the team's work is to combine each of the isolated tests they've already completed successfully into a final experiment that produces fusion using this technology. "We hope we can interest the world with the fact that fusion isn't always 40 years away and doesn't always cost $2 billion," Slough said in a statement. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original story on SPACE.com. |
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