How a maglev train works.
The future of transportation may find travelers flying on vehicles that have no wings. Magnetically levitated trains, which use the attracting and repelling forces of magnets, jet through the air just millimeters off a specialized track-some at speeds of 550 kilometers per hour. Maglevs are quieter and consume less energy than trains with wheels that touch the track.
The city of Shanghai, China, is building a high-speed German maglev dubbed Transrapid, which will whisk people the 33 kilometers between downtown Shanghai and Pudong International Airport. And by 2004, the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund a $950 million project to build a maglev train either between Baltimore and Washington or between Pittsburgh International Airport and downtown Pittsburgh.
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed