Seems like it wasn’t all that long ago when any kind of human-powered flight was a very ambitious goal.
The Snowbird Human-Powered Ornithopter was designed and constructed by a team of students from the University of Toronto. On August 2nd 2010 it sustained level flight for 19.3 seconds, becoming the world’s first successful human-powered ornithopter.
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More info at hpo.ornithopter.net.
Via a tweet from @bruces.
Tons of quibbling possible – no The Elements of Programming Style
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N.B. – a tech canon is very different from the meatball cannon drawn for me yesterday by a slightly off-task, but creative, second grader.
The Atlantic Tech Canon – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.
But even that web is dwarfed by those spun by Darwin’s bark spider.
“They build their web with the orb suspended directly above a river or the water body of a lake, a habitat that no other spider can use,” says Professor Ingi Agnarsson, the director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan who made the discovery with colleagues.
That allows the spiders to catch insects flying over water, and explains why the web is so long.
To reach from one bank to the other, the spider must weave anchoring lines of up to 25m.
BBC – Earth News – Gigantic spider’s web discovered in Madagascar.