Windowless Plane Makes Flying Amazing But Terrifying

Aerophobia: the fear of flying is common for many people. Being 30,000 feet in the air in a tin can isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But in ten years time, flying may become even more terrifying! What about windowless airplanes?

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is hoping to develop a technology that will allow windowless planes to be a thing of the present. The hope is to limit the use of fuel by reducing the weight of aircrafts. Rather than windows, flexible display screens would take their place by covering the entire wall of the cabin. Passengers would be able to see outside the plane. Terrifying or exciting? It depends of who you are. Some of us prefer to forget we are no longer on the ground.

CPI states that 80% of the weight of an airplane is actually the plane itself along with its fuel. “We had been speaking to people in aerospace and we understood that there was this need to take weight out of aircraft. Follow the logical thought through. Let’s take all the windows out— that’s what they do in cargo aircraft,” states Jon Helliwell of the CPI.

Reducing a plane’s weight by 1% means 0.75% less fuel is used. This leads to fewer CO2 emissions, lower costs and cheaper plane tickets.

So what would replace the windows? Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). This flexible display screen would allow a projected panoramic view from cameras attached to the outside of the plane. Passengers could adjust their views, watch videos and use the internet using this versatile technology.
CPI is hoping this technology will be available in the next 10 years. But we will have to see how the idea flies with the everyday passenger.

How to Use the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop

Arthur C Clarke’s third law of prediction states – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” and if you’ve ever used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, you’ll know exactly what Arthur was talking about. Using a very simple technique of allowing you to sample areas of an existing image and use them as a brush, you can create amazing effects with very little effort.

The clone stamp tool works by allowing the user to select a point in an image, and then copy it in real time to any other part of the image, it’s particularly effective if you have a complex organic pattern or texture and want to seamlessly cover over or expand an area elsewhere in the image. You can also, of course, clone part of a completely different image, so it’s also a very quick and simple way of mixing elements of different images into one. It is also often used for removing blemishes on photographs, something I’m sure we’ve all been tempted to try.

The real trick of using the clone stamp tool is to master juggling opacity and brush hardness, so open any image of a face and try doing the following to get to grips with this new toy.
Nine items down on the left-hand Photoshop toolbar is what looks like a hand inkstamp, this is where the Clone Stamp and Pattern Stamp tools live. Right click and make sure the clone stamp tool is selected.

On the top toolbar where it says Brush, there is an arrow pointing down, click this to open the Brush parameters and alter the size of the brush to about the size of the eye on your face image and set the hardness to 40%. This means that whatever you are cloning will have a nice soft blended edge. Now move your cursor any area of the face that has a large area of skin, so probably the cheek or forehead. Press and hold the ALT key and left click on the centre of this area, this is where your clone stamp will sample. Move the cursor over a facial feature like the eye or nose, and use the clone stamp, it will brush the same image you sampled over the new area. Experiment with this and see if by sampling different areas you can produce a featureless face. If you find the cloned area does not blend well, try sampling a different area that is nearer the portion you are replacing until you get a better match.

Now try something subtler, open the original image, and this time also set the opacity to 70%, now find a blemish, a mole, spot or discoloured area on the face, sample a clear area using the ALT key and brush over the blemish, the opacity setting will smooth over the skin, very useful for tidying up photos and something magazines do as a matter of routine.

Since you have mastered the basics, try sampling more outlandish features, try an opaque soft brush sampling a leopard and brushing over another animal, give it a leopardskin makeover. You’ll soon be working magic.

AMPY Charges Your Phone Using Your Movement

Smartphones, tablets, and MP3 players are all great, but they all have a common flaw. Eventually, they each have to be charged lest they lose their charge and die; and all the gadgets in the world are useless with a dead battery. Honestly, it’s not too hard to carry around a charger to charge your device – the hard part is sometimes finding an outlet to plug your device into, especially if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, such as on a hike in the mountains, etc. Thankfully, technology has improved so much just within the last couple of years. Now, even if you don’t have an outlet to plug into, you can still charge your device(as long as it has a USB port, anyway). No, I am not talking about solar power – I’m talking about human power. AMPY is a device currently on Kickstarter which is able to capture and store your kinetic energy using a lithium ion battery, and is then able to use that same energy to charge your devices.

Honestly, it sounds pretty simple. It stores your energy and all you have to do is plug it into your device via the USB cable. Then, it charges it at the same speed as a traditional wall outlet, giving you power when you need it the most. The current battery in AMPY is able to store close to a week’s worth of your kinetic energy, and it’ll keep it saved up for months at a time. After all, you never know when you’re really going to need that extra charge.

AMPY has currently raised 1.5x their original goal of $100,000. And, if you act fast, you can still get one for $85.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below!