On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 08:50:35 -0800, BG wrote:

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 7:57:56 AM UTC-8, Soartech wrote:
Interesting research!
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...-uss020618.php

If this works so well, every swimmer would be using it.

Quite so: in this quote from the article "demonstrated a new, bioinspired
structure that could improve the aerodynamic performance of planes, wind
turbines, drones and cars." the give-away word is:

'could'

I see this sort of article almost every week in New Scientist. You never
see a follow-up article, mainly because 'could' seems to mean:

"one of our MSc student's micro-scale experiments showed a 0.2%
improvement over current technology. With any luck it will work even
better after we've scaled it up to a usable size and we'll get a huge
grant to help us set up a spin-off company and sell stuff to the
military".

But, of course it usually doesn't work worth a damn when scaled up and is
never heard of again. For some reason the subject of the article is
usually going revolutionise aerodynamics or battery technology.

Sinha Technology wing surface treatment, anybody?


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