ny_quant

1. A team of engineers has built and tested a radically new kind of airplane wing, assembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces. The wing can change shape to control the plane's flight, and could provide a significant boost in aircraft production, flight, and maintenance efficiency...

Instead of requiring separate movable surfaces such as ailerons to control the roll and pitch of the plane, as conventional wings do, the new assembly system makes it possible to deform the whole wing, or parts of it, by incorporating a mix of stiff and flexible components in its structure...

The result is a wing that is much lighter, and thus much more energy efficient, than those with conventional designs, whether made from metal or composites...

Because the structure, comprising thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, is composed mostly of empty space, it forms a mechanical "metamaterial" that combines the structural stiffness of a rubber-like polymer and the extreme lightness and low density of an aerogel.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-mit-nasa-kind-airplane-wing.html

2. A 'spaceplane' that flies 25 times faster than the speed of sound has successfully passed a crucial testing milestone. The hypersonic plane is so fast it could jet from London to New York in less than 60 minutes and transport you from the UK to Australia in four hours.

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/spaceplane-that-flies-25-times-faster-than-the-speed-of-sound-passes-crucial-test