You know how Batman goes up the side of a building so quickly, it's almost as if he's flying? Yes, he uses this gadget that fires a high-tensile line which he uses to reel himself up quickly. It's from the imagination of movie writers, but now it has become real with the invention of the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender. It is a toaster-size battery-driven device that is powerful enough to allow someone to rappel up a wall at 10 feet per second!
The inventors, Nate Ball, Tim Fofonoff, Bryan Schmid, Dan Walker, came up with the invention in 2004 as part of an annual military-gear-invention contest at MIT called the Soldier Design Competition. The gadget weighs 20-pounds and has a motorized rope-winding mechanism that holds the rope. “Until recently, it just wouldn’t have been small enough,” Fofonoff says. The team had the help of a company that produces high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. Fofonoff says their invention has a greater power-to-weight ratio than a Dodge Viper.
The US Air Force is planning on making bat planes. Yes, these future guardians of the sky will have technology based on the physical attributes of bats. They plan to make compact and maneuverable aerial vehicles. Engineer Kenneth Breuer and biologist Sharon Swartz have teamed up in the project to take high-resolution 3D videos of flying bats in a wind chamber to see how they slip through air. The scientists discovered that bats can be far nimbler and maneuverable than birds or insects. This is most likely because "a bat’s wings are thin and have flexible membranes interwoven with highly articulated muscles and joints that adjust both lift and drag in many ways." The study would justify Batman's preference for bat-designs on his jet.
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