Omni - where are they now? (July 1992)

I smell a series coming on. In a similar style to a recent posting, I read the July 1992 edition of Omni magazine this week, and thought I'd try to followup on a couple of interesting articles, to see where they are now.

• Plane with a moveable wing: Octave Chanute was an inventor in America around the time that the Wright brothers were doing their first flight at Kittyhawk in 1903. He suggested to them that they should use a moveable or "rocking" wing, rather than a fixed wing, as it would have resulted in a safer and smoother flight. Unfortunately, they didn't happen, and the rest is history. That is until a modern plane called the freewing took up where Chanute left off. Here's the full article.

  So where is the freewing now? Is the world of aeronautics about to have a paradigm shift? Appartently not. I found the website for Freewing Aerial Robotics Corp., a company in Maryland that has the patents on this technology. The corporate profile write about a lot of potential, but it all seems to be unfulfilled. The last entries appear to be dated about 2000.

  I did find some discussion about its use as a UCAV (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle) here, but it appears to be speculation.

  My guess is that if anything is going to come out of this, it'll be a long time before we see it, particularily in the commercial arena.

• A Grisly Death for a Grisly Insect: This piece, in the Continuum column, describes a baited chamber lined with a fungus that infects insects like pests like cockroaches and devours their internal organs. A company called Ecoscience of Worcester, Massachusetts employs a microbe that occurs naturally in soil and produces a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae.

  The unsuspecting roach creeps into a chamber covered with the stuff, which rubs off on its body. Twelve hours later it penetrates the bug's cuticle, spreads through the body and begins consuming internal tissue.

  Sound lovely. The theory is that the cockroach could spread the fungus through a whole colony simply by crawling over and nesting with other roaches.

  The plan was to get EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) approval and make a product available to professional exterminators and the general public after that.

  So did everything go to plan? Here's the EPA ruling, but I couldn't find any product announcements based on this. Only on pesticides with other "ingredients", such as this one. I'm no expert at reading EPA rulings, but I'm wondering whether the amendments to the petition, made the final ruling too restrictive.

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( Oct 31 2004, 05:00:16 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]