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NASA tests airplane wings that shrug off insect guts
You may not think of insects as a problem for aircraft (Bambi Meets Godzilla comes to mind), but they really are -- the residue from those splattered bugs slows aircraft down and hikes fuel consumption. NASA may soon have a way to keep those critters from causing so much trouble, however. It recently conducted flight testing for a promised non-stick wing coating that stops ex-bugs from inducing drag. The layer, which combines a lotus leaf-inspired ("microscopically-rough") repellant surface with anti-sticking chemicals, was good enough to cut back on the nasty organic residue by as much as 40 percent.
Nepal Airlines sacrifices two goats to fix a 757
We've definitely done some crazy things to fix our gear -- we swear our Sawtooth Power Mac G4 actually ran faster after we dumped a can of Diet Coke into it -- but we've never gone as Nepal Airlines recently did. Faced with intractable mechanical problems on one of the fleet's two 757 jets, authorities at the state-run airline apparently sacrificed two goats to the Hindu god Akash Bhairab (pictured in the airline's logo, to the right) in front of the plane, which promptly took the skies again problem-free. That's pretty much all the information anyone has, but Nepal Airlines has confirmed that "the snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights." We're not going to comment on anyone's religious beliefs here, but that had to have been the weirdest pilots' announcement of all time.
