DoE calls for a chemical battery with 5x capacity, within 5 years – can it be done?

The Department of Energy wants batteries with five times the energy storage of those we have today. They want them to be five times cheaper and to be ready in five years. Earlier this year the Department’s solicitation for proposals was announced, and now five universities have been chosen for the job along with several national labs and private companies. According to US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a “Manhattan Project-like atmosphere” is to be fostered. With a funding level of only $120 million and no visible enemy at the border, what are the prospects for success?

By most estimates the Manhattan Project — a research program that led to the first atomic bomb — was funded to the tune of $2 billion, which today would be around $20 billion. TheBattery and Energy Storage Hub, as the new project is called, barely scratches the surface of that. Today’s chemical battery technology is fairly mature, and a serious competitor that would be viable on this projected timescale has yet to emerge. Exotic materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes are being explored as anode materials, and seemingly far-out concepts like using viruses to self assemble electrodes have been studied, but these concepts have yet to be proved. To achieve the kind of numbers that the DoE expects, we can only guess at what these folks might may have hiding up their sleeves.

One alternative to Li-ion batteries that has been proposed is an aluminum-ion (Al-ion) battery. Al-ion would have a potential energy density of 1kW-hr/kg compared with 0.4 kW-hr/kg for Li-ion. Aluminum has the advantage of possessing three valence electrons compared to lithium’s single available valence electron. The result is that battery charge/discharge reactions involving aluminum can transfer three times as many electrons and hence triple the current per chemical unit.

Metal-ion batteries still have the drawback that they cannot be discharged to zero. One might have thought that the Tesla roadster would have been designed so that this could never happen, however Murphy’s law recently provided for dramatic headlines as severalowners were rumored to have gotten stuck with huge tabs for replacement batteries. Another sore point for metal-ion batteries was highlighted by a recent Chevy Volt crash test report. Three weeks after a rollover test impacted the battery, it caught fire.

Overcoming gasoline

At 13kW-hr/kg, gasoline is still a far more attractive option so long as cities have greater troubles to tend to than the associated noise and smog it brings. To really compete today,metal-air batteries (such as Li-air) producing electricity from reaction with atmospheric oxygen are needed. Like a jet engine, they do not need to internally store oxidizer. Their effective energy density is therefore much higher, comparable in fact to gasoline. The major trade-off is the lack of ability to easily recharge electrically. While cities are thinking more critically about electrifying the transportation sector with charging stations and underground wireless induction coils at traffic lights, the battery sector is already moving on — hence the urgency of the new battery mandate.

One challenge to recharging a Li-air battery lies in keeping it protected from the environment. The cathode needs oxygen but it is degraded by humidity. The cathode also needs a huge surface area, which makes designing a compact battery more difficult. This also means that while energy density is high, the power density is typically low, equating to hard limits on the rate at which power can be put in or drawn off the battery. For electric vehicles looking to be quick off the mark, a supplementary supercapacitorcharging itself in the background from the battery could be used for those times when the motor needs a lot of current.

Al-air batteries are an attractive technology that has already seen use in military vehicles. Aluminum is a familiar metal, more abundant and less strategic than lithium. As primary cells — i.e. non-rechargeable — the aluminium anode is slowly consumed by its reaction with atmospheric oxygen at the cathode. The cathode, immersed in a water-based electrolyte, converts the aluminum into hydrated aluminum oxide at which point the battery will no longer produce electricity. Physically recycling the aluminum anode from hydrated aluminum oxide is possible but not a process that is envisioned to happen on board a vehicle. Designers also need keep in mind that since metal-ion batteries gain oxygen during their operation, they would be expected to acquire mass as they are depleted.

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EU seeks to reduce world’s energy usage, and double data center speeds, by replacing copper with fiber

Data centers are big and costly. Engineers all over the world are working hard at making servers and networking more efficient. Processors are using less power, cooling is getting easier, and evenrouters are reducing their footprint. Sadly, data centers are still using a gigantic amount of power, so the European Union is funding a trend away from traditional electrical data connections. Headed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, project PhoxTroT aims at reducing power consumption by using light-based data connections, while at the same time increasing transfer speeds to two terabits per second (Tbps).

An article from Fraunhofer explains that this four-year project isn’t about reinventing the wheel — optical data transfer is already used around the world. Instead, PhoxTroT will be focused on taking existing technologies, combining them, and refining them into a system that will save money and use less energy while doubling connection speeds. “They will realize the optical transmission on a printed circuit board (‘on-board’), ‘board-to-board’ and also ‘rack-to-rack’. By combining these interfaces, it will also be possible to bridge longer distances within the foreseeable future,” says the article. This isn’t just a dolled-up fiber optic cable — this is taking the technology to the next level by integrating light-based data transfer throughout entire data centers on the individual server level, while increasing the effective range to hundreds of kilometers.

Not only is optical networking more power efficient and faster than its copper counterpart, but it’s also more robust in the face of disaster. After Hurricane Sandy took out a non-trivial amount of communications on the east coast of the United States, telcos went through and replaced copper lines with fiber-optic cables to update their network speeds and reliability. Electrical data transfer like typical coaxial and Ethernet cables still have a place, but it is slowly being overtaken in usefulness by optical data transfer. If PhoxTroT is a success, copper wiring will become even more of a niche.

With a little under twelve million dollars invested by the European Union, and eighteen different companies working together over the next four years, PhoxTroT can transform the data center into a much more eco-friendly and cost effective endeavor. Google‘s data centers alone draw 260 million watts continuously. A single Amazon data center in 2011 drew eight million watts continuously. Worldwide, data centers account for around 30 billion watts — a few percent of the world’s total power usage.

If these engineers can double the data throughput while using a small fraction of the power traditional networking uses, we’re talking savings of tens of millions of dollars per data center. The EU should be applauded for its efforts, and other countries and organizations should take a page out of its handbook in this instance. We’re saving money and saving the planet one data center at a time.

Now read: Will 100Mbps internet connections destroy the web as we know it?

[Image credit: Adrienne Serra & Alex]

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Harvard creates self-assembling DNA nanostructures from tiny DNA ‘Lego bricks’

Harvard’s Wyss Institute, which brought us 700-terabytes-per-gram-of-DNA data storage earlier in the year, has now produced DNA Lego bricks — three-dimensional DNA building blocks that self-assemble into more than 100 different, three-dimensional structures (pictured above).

These DNA Lego bricks are short strands of DNA that have been specially crafted to join with other DNA bricks at a 90-degree angle — just as if you had pushed two eight-stud Lego bricks on top of each other at 90 degrees. By joining more and more of these DNA bricks together, a 3D structure emerges. In this case, the DNA Legos are built into 25-nanometer cubes, which consist of around 1,000 voxels, with each voxel consisting of DNA strands that are just 2.5nm. A voxel (volumetric pixels) is a term borrowed from graphics; it’s essential the 3D equivalent of a 2D pixel.

The Wyss Institute call these cubes the “master molecular canvas.” By restricting which DNA bricks are available during self-assembly, 102 distinct 3D shapes were formed. In the image at the top of the story you can see the simulated 3D models of these 102 shapes, and below is an actual microscopic view from above. As you can see, the level of detail is really quite astonishing — and even better, some of the shapes include intricately detailed tunnels and cavities. “This is a simple, versatile and robust method,” says Peng Yin, who led the project.

Essentially, Peng Yin is now an architect of, quite possibly, the world’s smallest building blocks. Intel alters features that are perhaps 30 nanometers in size, while Yin has the power to alter a single 2.5nm voxel. This is important and exciting because changing a single voxel could alter the function of the DNA cube, much as moving a single transistor alters the function of a computer chip.

As for what these self-assembled DNA cubes will actually be used for, the answer is probably medicine. DNA molecules are (obviously) biocompatible, and Harvard’s Wyss Institute is generally oriented towards medical research. The general idea is that you could somehow fashion a DNA structure that interacts with the human body in a curative or preventative way — or, more simply, you might fashion a DNA cube that can carry medicine to a specific region of the body.

Moving forward, there could be non-medical applications too. In much the same way thatHarvard’s DNA data storage could be used for storage in computer systems, these DNA building blocks might one day form the basis of biological (or digital-biological hybrid) computers.

Now read: Living organ-on-a-chip could soon replace animal testing

Research paper: DOI: 10.1126/science.1227268 – “Three-Dimensional Structures Self-Assembled from DNA Bricks”

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Self-healing, self-heating flash memory survives more than 100 million cycles

Macronix, one of the world’s largest producers of flash memory, has produced a new kind of flash memory that can survive more than 100 million program/erase (PE) cycles — most likely long enough to persist until the end of human civilization. By comparison, the NAND cells found in conventional flash memory — as in commercial SSDs — generally have a lifespan of just a few thousand PE cycles.

For such a huge advance you would expect an equally vast technological leap — but in this instance, that’s certainly not the case. Macronix just adds a bit of heat — literally, each of Macronix’s new memory cells contains a heating element that can deliver a jolt of 800C (1472F) heat to the cell, healing it and preventing wear-out. Furthermore, 100 million PE cycles is a low-ball estimate: In reality, Macronix’s new flash might survive billions of cycles — but it would take so long to test that the company doesn’t yet know.

Why does heat fix a flash memory cell? It’s all down to the physical structure. NAND flash is constructed from floating-gate transistors, which are exactly what they sound like. Basically, the control gate (which controls the flow of electricity across the transistor) floats above an additional oxide layer. In effect, the bit value of the cell is stored in this floating gate. To trigger the gate — to change the bit value — a certain threshold of current is required to jump through the oxide layer. Over time, this oxide layer degrades, eventually causing the cell to fail.

By applying heat, this oxide layer can be annealed, returning it to its base state. Macronix has known about this annealing effect for years — but historically its testing involved putting a bunch of memory chips in an oven and baking at 250C (482F) for a few hours. Obviously this wasn’t the best solution for consumer electronics, and so a new method had to be devised. Ta’da: Macronix’s NAND memory cell with built-in heat plates (pictured right).

In these new heat-assisted cells, the heating plates flash on for a few milliseconds and then turn off. This process does consume extra power, but the heating only has to be done infrequently — so it could be done while plugged into the wall, over night. As a curious side effect, Macronix also reports that hot memory allows for faster erasing — though the company doesn’t seem to know why this is. “Further down, this may evolve into a ‘thermally assisted’ mode of operation that gives both better performance — such as the faster erasing — and better endurance flash memory,” says Hang-Ting Lue of Macronix to IEEE Spectrum.

As you can imagine, this heat-assisted memory cell’s structure and footprint is quite different from conventional NAND cells. Macronix doesn’t give us a timeline for commercial availability, which is a hint that current NAND flash processes probably aren’t capable of producing the new memory. Given the world’s love affair with mobile devices and high-speed flash storage, though, it’s almost certainly a matter of when Macronix’s heat-assisted memory will come to market, not if.

Now read: Cache of the titans: SSD storage accelerators from Intel and Corsair face off

[Image credit: IEEE]

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Spaun, the most realistic artificial human brain yet

A group of neuroscientists and software engineers at the University of Waterloo in Canada are claiming to have built the world’s most complex, large-scale model simulation of the human brain. The simulated brain, which runs on a supercomputer, has a digital eye which it uses for visual input, a robotic arm that it uses to draw its responses — and it can pass the basic elements of an IQ test.

The brain, called Spaun (Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network), consists of 2.5 million simulated neurons, allowing it to perform eight different tasks. These tasks range from copy drawing to counting, to question answering and fluid reasoning. At this point, you should watch the video below to get a rough idea of how Spaun works — and then read on to find out why Spaun is so interesting.

Now, the nitty-gritty details. Spaun has a 28×28 (784-pixel) digital eye, and a robotic arm which can write on some paper. Every interaction with Spaun is through its 784-pixel eye. The scientists flash up a bunch of numbers and letters, which Spaun reads into memory, and then another letter or symbol acts as the command, telling Spaun what to do with its memory. The output of the task is then inscribed by the robotic arm.

Spaun’s brain consists of 2.5 million neurons that are broken down into a bunch of simulated cranial subsystems, including the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, which are wired together with simulated neurons that very accurately mimic the wiring of a real human brain. The basic idea is that these subsystems behave very similarly to a real brain: Visual input is processed by the thalamus, the data is stored in the neurons, and then the basal ganglia fires off a task to a part of the cortex that’s designed to handle that task.

All of this computation is performed in a physiologically accurate way, with simulated voltage spikes and neurotransmitters. Even the limitations of the human brain are simulated, as you can see in the video below, with Spaun struggling to store more than a few numbers in its short-term memory.

The end result is a brain that is mechanistically simple (2.5 million neurons isn’t really much to write home about), but which is surprisingly flexible. By implementing just a handful of very basic tasks, it’s interesting to see how complex behavior begins to emerge. There are some tantalizing hints as to how the brain evolved: starting with simple tasks, and then building upon and weaving them together to build complex functionality. In the video below, Spaun recognizes the pattern of a number sequence — the kind of question you would find on an actual IQ test.

Moving forward, the research team, led by Chris Eliasmith, wants to imbue Spaun with adaptive plasticity — the ability to rewire its neurons and learn new tasks simply by doing, rather than being pre-programmed. As for the ultimate end goal, Eliasmith is excited about Spaun’s prospects. “It lets us understand how the brain, the biological substrate, and behavior relate. That’s important for all sorts of health applications,” he says in an interview with PopSci. In testing he has “killed” synthetic neurons and watched performance degrade, which could provide an interesting insight into natural aging and degenerative disorders.

Spaun is built upon Nengo, a graphical open-source software package for building simulated neural systems. You can actually download the Spaun neural model, if you want to simulate your own brain — though I suspect it might require a little more processing power than your desktop PC.

Now read: Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data

Research paper: DOI: 10.1126/science.1225266 – “A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain”

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Rice University creates graphene/nanotube hybrid material that could redefine electronics and energy storage

What could possibly be cooler than graphene or carbon nanotubes? Rice University’s new material that consists of forests of carbon nanotubes grown on sheets of graphene, of course!

This graphene/nanotube hybrid is as awesome as it sounds, too; we’re talking about a material that might be the single best electrode interface possible, potentially revolutionizing both energy storage (batteries, supercapacitors) and electronics.

To create the hybrid material, the James Tour Group at Rice University began with a copper substrate coated in a single layer of carbon atoms (graphene). From here, the process is a little bit mystical — it sounds like they place a mixture of aluminium oxide and an “iron catalyst” on the graphene, and heat the whole thing in a furnace. Within a few minutes, carbon nanotubes skyscrapers spring up from the graphene.

As you can see in the picture below, we’re quite literally talking about a sheet of graphene with carbon nanotubes growing upwards from it — up to a distance of 120 microns (0.12mm), which is really rather impressive at this scale. If we scaled it up to actual trees, they would rise into outer space. As you can see in the image at the top of the story, the carbon nanotube forest is also very dense. The most important thing, though, is that the bonds between the graphene and nanotubes are completely seamless — as far as electrons are concerned, there is absolutely no resistance when transitioning between graphene and nanotube.

Why is this important? Because this hybrid material has a ridiculously vast surface area: A single gram of the new material has a surface area of 2,000 square meters (21,500 sq ft) — half an acre of the most conductive material in the world. When it comes to energy storage, there is a direct correlation between energy density and the surface area of the electrodes — this new graphene/nanotube hybrid could result in significantly smaller batteries, or larger batteries that can do more work. In testing, Rice University created a supercapacitor with the new material that matches “the best carbon-based supercapacitors that have ever been made,” which is impressive because “we’re not really a supercapacitor lab, and still we were able to match the performance because of the quality of the electrode.”

Moving forward, the next step for advances such as this is production of the new material in commercial quantities. In all likelihood, the research baton will now pass to commercial companies, such as Intel, Sony, or Samsung, who will try to develop real components and batteries using the graphene/carbon nanotube hybrid material.

Now read: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

Research paper: doi:10.1038/ncomms2234 – “A seamless three-dimensional carbon nanotube graphene hybrid material”

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3D-printed consumer electronics just became a reality

Embedding sensors and electronics inside of 3D objects in a single build process has been a long sought after goal in 3D printing (3DP). A group led by Simon Leigh, at the University of Warwick in England, has now done just that. Leigh’s group developed a low-cost material they call carbomorph – a carbon black filler in a matrix of a biodegradable polyester.

In addition to being conductive, carbomorph is piezoresistive. This means which that when it is bent or stressed, its resistance changes. Typically the resistance increases as the object is bent because the conductive grains are spread further apart. Piezoresistive strips of carbon nanotubes have been created previously by other groups and used in the measurement of movement, but printing them is something new.

The goal of Leigh’s group was to completely print a motion sensing glove in a single unbroken run. This required a machine with multiple heads, and their Bits from Bytes BFB3000 fit the bill. In one head they used used polylactic acid (PLA) to print the main body of the glove. The other head contained the carbomorph for the embedded sensing strips in each finger. The cross section of embedded strip was only .25 square microns yet proved sufficient for getting a robust piezoelectric signal to compute the bend angle.

In an effort to make their work freely available they published it in the open access journalPLoS ONE. The piezoresistive measurements were done using the popular Arduino Uno interface board and captured with Processing, an open-source software package for visualizing and manipulating data.

The group also printed capacitive buttons of the kind used in many common touch sensors, or as mouse replacements for human interface devices (HIDs). Capacitive measurements were also carried out with an Arduino, and implemented with the CapSense code library. The ability to print capacitive sensors potentially opens up 3DP to new areas including accurate measurement of distance, humidity, or acceleration.

For the group’s final demonstration, things start to really get interesting. Two vertical capacitive sensor strips were embedded in the wall of a 3DP mug. This “smart vessel” yielded a reliable capacitance measurement which scaled linearly with the height of the fluid in the cup. One might imagine inexpensive party cups which report and summon a refill whenever a guest’s drink falls below a certain level.

Conductive 3D-printed materials, by nature of their composition, have only a fraction of metal or carbon’s electrical conductivity. Therefore at any interface with other electronics, where there will already be some unavoidable loss of any signal, extra care must be taken. It is for this reason that high-end audiophiles are willing to spend the extra money for gold-plated contacts — more signal is transduced and less is absorbed or reflected back to induce ringing or other unwanted noise.

In the case of capacitive button sensors, the group got around this problem by printing high-surface-area contacts in the shape of the commonly used banana-style plug. On the smart vessel they opted instead to use copper pads connected with silver conductive paint. There is no reason why copper or other metals might not someday also be printed. For example, several cancer treatments, like cisplatin, are basically metals bonded to chemical groups which make them soluble. This allows them to pass across membranes into cells or to be miscible with other solutions. Printing them in hydrophobic solvent which evaporates leaving behind the metal may one day be possible.

One thing yet to be done is to test the durability of the devices over time. If they are able to maintain the essential characteristics over many use cycles, and trips to the dishwasher, then these devices could find widespread application. Then again, if your product lifetime is only a couple of hours, like for a red Solo cup, they would already be perfect.

Now read: 3D printing: a replicator and teleporter in every home

Research paper: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049365 – “A Simple, Low-Cost Conductive Composite Material for 3D Printing of Electronic Sensors”

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Microsoft sells 40 million Windows 8 copies in the first month, defying skeptical expectations

In surprising but wholly welcome news, Microsoft has announced that, since its release one month ago, it has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses — roughly the same number of Windows 7 licenses sold in the same period three years ago. Furthermore, in terms of upgrades, Windows 8 is “outpacing” Windows 7′s first month.

Before you hang primary-colored rectilinear bunting everywhere and warmly welcome our new Metro overlords, however, we have to drill a little further into these figures. As before, with the news that Microsoft sold four million copies of Windows 8 in its opening weekend, we still don’t know how many of those 40 million licenses are actually installed. There is the distinct possibility that many of those licenses are still sitting on retailers’ shelves.

It’s also important to note that Windows 8 is being deeply discounted at launch — much more so than Windows 7. It’s possible that people are ponying up for Windows 8 while itonly costs $40, but waiting to see how the cross-paradigmatic Metro/Desktop train wreckplays out before actually installing. We also don’t yet know the impact of Microsoft’saccidental giveaway of free Windows 8 Pro license keys, though presumably these freebies aren’t being factored into the 40 million.

Despite our hesitant hedging, though, it’s clear that Windows 8 hasn’t been a complete flop — in fact, so far, it has been rather successful. Without further info from Microsoft, we don’t know why Windows 8 has been a success — but seemingly that’s just a cross we’ll have to bear until Microsoft feels slightly more comfortable. Are Windows 8 desktops flying off the shelves? Tablets? Or are the 40 million licenses predominantly upgrades from XP, Vista, and 7? Who knows. For what it’s worth, Microsoft still hasn’t released sales figures forits own Surface tablet.

In other news, Tami Reller, the Windows division’s CFO and CMO, shared some interesting tidbits on a call with industry and financial analysts. Microsoft’s early telemetry shows that 90% of users find the Charms bar on their first day, 85% open the Desktop, and 50% visit the Windows Store — where, apparently, some apps have already been downloaded one million times. Maybe that video of an old guy navigating Windows 8 for the first time (embedded below) was just a tad on the hyperbolically skeptical side.

Now read: Under the hood of Windows 8, or why desktop users should upgrade from Windows 7

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Clean, limitless fusion power could arrive sooner than expected

Good news, denizens of Earth: If the findings from two premier research labs are to be believed, commercial nuclear fusion is feasible — and could arrive sooner than expected.

The first breakthrough comes from Sandia National Laboratories (the same engineers who brought us the fanless heatsink). At SNL, a research team has been working on a new way of creating fusion called magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF). This approach is quite similar to the National Ignition Facility at the LLNL in California, where they fuse deuterium and tritium (hydrogen isotopes) by crushing and heating the fuel with 500 trillion watts of laser power. Instead of lasers, MagLIF uses a massive magnetic pulse (26 million amps), created by Sandia’s Z Machine (a huge X-ray generator), to crush a small cylinder containing the hydrogen fuel. Through various optimizations, the researchers discovered a MagLIF setup that almost breaks even(i.e. it almost produces more thermal energy than the electrical energy required to begin the fusion reaction).

Probably more significant is news from the Joint European Torus (JET), a magnetic confinement fusion facility in the UK. JET is very similar to the ITER nuclear fusion reactor, an international project which is being built in the south of France. Whereas NIF and Sandia create an instantaneous fusion reaction using heat and pressure, ITER and JET confine the fusing plasma for a much longer duration using strong magnetic fields, and are thus more inclined towards the steady production of electricity. JET’s breakthrough was the installation of a new beryllium-lined wall and tungsten floor inside the tokamak — the doughnut-shaped inner vessel that confines 11-million-degrees-Celsius plasma (pictured above).

Carbon is the conventional tokamak lining (and the lining that had been chosen for the first iteration of ITER) but now it seems the beryllium-tungsten combo significantly improves the quality of the plasma. Hopefully this information will allow ITER to skip the carbon tokamak and jump straight to beryllium-tungsten, shaving years and millions of dollars off the project.

Moving forward, JET will actually try full-blown fusion with the optimum mix of deuterium and tritium (16 megawatts, for less than a second). At this point, JET is practically an ITER testbed, so its results from the next year or two will have a large impact on the construction of ITER’s tokamak, which should be completed by 2019.

Before today, magnetic confinement fusion was generally considered to be more mature and efficient than inertial confinement fusion — but Sandia’s new approach might change that. ITER is one of the world’s largest ongoing engineering projects (it’s expected to cost around $20 billion), and yet critics are quick to point out that we still don’t know if it will actually work. ITER isn’t expected to fuse D-T fuel until 2027 (producing 500 megawatts for up to 1,000 seconds) — and an awful lot can happen in 15 years. Still, the main thing is that we’re actually working on fusion power — when we’re talking about limitless, clean power, it’s probably worth investing a few billion dollars, even if it doesn’t work out.

Fusion reactors are some of the most beautiful constructions you’ll ever see, so be sure to check out our galleries of the National Ignition Facility and the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

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US Air Force’s 1950s supersonic flying saucer declassified

Tighten the strap on your tinfoil hat: Recently declassified documents show that the US Air Force was working on, and perhaps had already built, a supersonic flying saucer in 1956.

The aircraft, which had the code name Project 1794, was developed by the USAF and Avro Canada in the 1950s. One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km).

As far as we can tell, the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coandă effect. Maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge of the disc (similar to ailerons on a winged aircraft). Power would be provided by jet turbines. According to the cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would even be capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL).

These images (two more at the end of the story) come fromthe US National Archives, which is tasked with preserving important records and documents — including declassified military documents. It isn’t clear why it has taken some 64 years for Project 1794 to be declassified, though it does follow on from the declassified news in 2008 that the US government has been monitoring UFO activity for more than 30 years. There are apparently two whole boxes of Project 1794 documents — but only the four images shown here have been digitized.

Without a deeper look inside those boxes, we can’t be sure that Project 1794 ever made it off the ground. It’s worth noting that Avro Canada also worked on the VZ-9 Avrocar, though — which is basically the same as Project 1794, but a lot smaller. The Avrocar was originally specified for a max speed of 300 mph and a service ceiling of 10,000 feet — but in practice, it never got more than three feet off the ground or flew faster than 35mph.

Despite the Avrocar’s failures, it is clear that the US government was indeed working on aircraft in the 1950s that resembled flying saucers. Suffice it to say, the US might also have been working on flying saucers back in the ’40s, around the same time as the Roswell UFO incident.

Ultimately, though, the fact that we use fixed-wing aircraft today is a good indicator that flying saucers, while cool, just aren’t that functional. If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting. Sadly, while some UFO sightings may have indeed been Project 1794, it’s unlikely that they were anything more than experiments carried out by humans, not aliens.

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