Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will be using supercomputers, airplanes, and artillery (and probably a bit of voodoo) in an effort to keep it from raining over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, in the city this summer.

The process involves three stages. First, the region’s weather will be tracked using satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer. This massive computing power will be able to model an area of 44,000 square kilometers accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each square kilometer.

Then, two aircraft and twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around the city will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds to flush out their rain before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rebel clouds that manage to survive this bombardment will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that the rain won’t fall until the clouds have passed over the stadium.

It looks as if we’ll see whether humans have finally conquered Mother Nature this summer. We do wonder, though, if this rain-preventing business is bad for the environment. [Technology Review]

Finally! The world’s first permitted cell phone call has been made on an Emirates flight between Dubai and Casablanca.

In order to allow calls, the airline fitted a plane with a system designed by AeroMobile that prevents mobile phones from interfering with the aircraft’s electronics. Emirates also had to obtain approval from international air safety organizations.

The company said that it decided to introduce the ability to use cell phones after seeing high demand for the phones installed in seats.

Of course, this might not be such good news for those who like to sleep on flights. However, Emirates is letting the cabin crew have the final say over cell phone usage, and the system will prevent calls at night to keep disturbances to a minimum.

Emirates plans to extend the system to more planes and add BlackBerry and other data services. Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend, as being able to use a cell phone (in moderation) would be very convenient during flights. [via BBC]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will soon award a contract for development of an unmanned aircraft that is capable of staying in the air for up to five years at a time.

DARPA’s project, called Vulture, aims to create a craft that can fly uninterrupted over an area for extended periods of time while performing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and communication missions. Read more »

Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have announced a project called Green Freedom, aimed at extracting CO₂ from the air and converting it into fuel to power cars and airplanes.

Green Freedom hopes to provide a method of large-scale production of carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuels and organic chemicals from air and water. Their goal is to create a fuel that will work with today’s existing car and airplane engines.

The footprint of the technology is fairly small. It would outfit existing nuclear power plants with carbon-capture equipment, so no new facilities would need to be built.

This project is a huge leap forward in the quest to protect our environment. Who can complain about taking harmful carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into fuel? We’re all for this project, and hopefully they can get the technology ready soon so it can be put to work.

British engineers are working on an airplane design dubbed the A2 and affectionately named the “Son of Concorde.” The aircraft would fly at twice the speed of the old Concorde and at five times the speed of sound.

The engineers believe that this is the future of modern air travel. The A2 would fly with a top speed of 3,400mph and be able to take 300 passengers between London and Sydney in under five hours. Its engines are powered by liquid hydrogen and produce few carbon emissions, making this plane much greener than the ones we have today.

Of course, the plane is loud as ever. The A2 would have to fly just under Mach 1 until it reached unpopulated areas at which point it would crank the engines to their full Mach 5 capabilities.

The aircraft is fast, green, and looks great. Can we ask for anything else? We hope that the design comes to life so we can hop on one of these for our next international trip.