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Comment by beanjuice | Hacker News Reader

There is a comment from Pubpeer [0] on this research [1] if anyone is curious:

"This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006.

MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft."

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9

[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U

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So is this just MIT being MIT (overhyping everything) or did this guy and his team somehow miss all of this? Is our scientific knowledge really that scattered?

I'm not sure that the guy who patented this is considered a "serious" scientist. After all, he did patent a technology from the 60's.

Otherwise, this just seems to be MIT being MIT: creating a trivial improvement on an old technology (in this case, moving the boost converter onto the airplane to avoid a tether wire), and publicizing the hell out of it because it's cool.

Keep in mind that the MIT Press office != the professors at MIT. It's actually quite common for any University's press office to be clueless about the research being done at the university, and it is their job to make as big of a splash as possible.

This is much like the oft-cited issue that the reporters aren't responsible for the headlines --- that is picked by the editors to make as big of a splash as possible.

As far as "patenting a technology from the 60's", even an incremental improvement on an old idea is still patentable. The real test is whether the patent cited the prior art, and you can bet that MIT Press Office didn't read the patent application before breathlessly sending out the press release.

That is a good point. MIT professors are usually very aware of the context of their work and the actual contributions they are making. Nevertheless, the MIT press office is a particularly egregious organization in terms of its tendency to exaggerate - my dad's lab cured cancer about 10 times in the early 2000's if you believe the press releases.

In this case, I'm not sure the MIT professor was aware of the "crackpot" invention that effectively pre-empted him. Many professors don't read patents (and there are lots of reasons why they shouldn't), and I'm not sure there was a paper.

One thing about patents is that if an invention is obvious in light of other inventions, it might not be patentable. In this case, I'm pretty sure that this combination of a technology from the 60's, a boost converter, and a LiPo battery may be "obvious" given the prevalence of other drones: it is a combination of two past inventions that fit together naturally (a drone + a propulsion technology). Of course, it will take millions of dollars worth of arguing for someone to say either way.

Where is the "breathless" part?

The part where the ozone that’s emitted from the high voltage field overwhelms you!

See also the 'science news cycle': https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

Making it work on its own without a tether wire sounds like a substantial improvement to me.

> a trivial improvement on an old technology (in this case, moving the boost converter onto the airplane to avoid a tether wire)

I wouldn’t call building an airplane that doesn’t need to be connected to the ground by wires a minor improvement. This makes a fun gimmick into something potentially useful.

I'd absolutely expect the guy and his team to know about prior work, but the article comes from the university "news office". In my experience university PR releases are always extremely overhyped, particularly from the elite universities.

Grad student: Look guys I built a little plane

News office: MIT SUPER-SCIENTIST INVENTS AIR TRAVEL

See this 2013 article. https://news.mit.edu/2013/ionic-thrusters-0403 In the 2018 article this submission is based on, you’re seeing 5 years of progress.

Well the headline i believe is technically accurate. Given that lifter type devices are aircraft but not aeroplanes.

It's certainly an iteration rather than a complete revolution but seems like an important step. Certainly something like this would have more practical application, a basically silent drone that could fly over a battlefield would be a huge win.

I'm baffled that MIT's PR is so cringeworthy. They had a priceless, universally recognized and irreplaceable brand and they are just trashing it with a sustained campaign of cheap clickbait seemingly aimed at a technologically ignorant audience. WTF? WHY? The Fools!

University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame.

I don't think it will dig itself out again.

Harvard and MIT have a lot of clout, and it's partly because of how incredibly massive they are. The Harvard network has more professors than some universities have pupils, (above two-thousand). Consequently just the amount of output due to a large number of people working there gets it placed high up in rating indices and such.

It's tough to say if it can keep up with its reputation. In some ways this phenomenon is comparable to gentrification: the beauty and soul of a place sometimes dies when the people who made that place what it is are displaced, like how Somerville and Berlin changed/are changing. It makes no sense for someone to remain committed in an academic career track when they're paying the kind of rent they do when around MIT/Harvard area with the income they make, so I agree with you that it's no longer attracting the kind of people that made MIT what it once was.

There are some institutions, that not many know about yet, that I'm confident in a couple of decades everyone will know about like U of Copenhagen and KIT & U of Stuttgart in Germany, and I think some in the midwest (Purdue, UMich, etc.) will one day have their day to shine too.

TU Munich is also getting really strong, they've been winning Elon Musk's Hyperloop for the past years I think

Just an aside on the topic of German research.

In Germany a lot of research is not done at the universities but at various institutes such as Max-Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz and a lot more.

General overview, research institutes being one item: https://www.research-in-germany.org/en/research-landscape.ht...

Ca. 400 universities - but ca. 1,000 publicly funded research institutions (https://www.research-in-germany.org/en/research-landscape/re...).

So, the ranking of the universities overall may not be completely comparable.

I wouldn't advertise on winning the hype-loop competitions too much...

Have you seen the videos?

MIT was established 161 years ago and Harvard was established 386 years ago, both young relative to Cambridge established 813 years ago and Oxford established 926 years ago. The clout of universities will ebb and flow, but I wouldn’t bet on 100+ year institutions losing their ability to attract talent anytime soon.

I agree - network effects predate the internet after all. As long as good universities keep producing talented graduates it will be hard to undermine their reputation. And I don't think ambitious people being driven towards certain universities for clout is a negative. I say this as someone who went to an increasingly recognized yet still underdog state school. Maybe instead of discarding MIT's reputation a nudge in the direction of increasing editorial oversight can suffice. Though sensationalism seems to be a prerequisite for visibility these days

I liked MIT when it was "increasingly recognized yet still underdog" a lot.

With ambitions, there are different levels:

- An ambitious scientist should be driven to make ambitious discoveries

- An ambitious scientist should not be driven to steal credit, fake results, hype, oversell, and defraud

MIT's culture changed over the past 20 years. High competition (e.g. 4:1) leads to the type of people who do good work. With insane competition (e.g. 1000:1), the only way to "win" is to cheat.

MIT lost its ability to attract talent about two decades ago. Talent wants to work their. The endowment is obscene, and they won't lose their ability to afford talent.

What they cant do is screen talent.

For faculty positions, the competition is extreme; around 1000:1. That lends itself to people who cheat the system. In this case, it means, at the very least, overselling results, baking data, and giving TED-style talks. In many cases, it results in much worse.

The extreme competition also drives off many people who just want to nerd.

MIT isn't going away anytime soon, but that's why I think the problems may be hard to fix. The culture is broken.

> University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame. > I don't think it will dig itself out again.

Don't know why, but makes me think of Google.

I very much doubt whether the MIT Press Office cares about what Hacker News thinks of their brand. What they do care about is what Sarah J. Student's parents think when they are trying to encourage their progency to attend Harvard vs Yale vs Stanford. And positive press is good towards achieving that mission, even if it is a bit click-baity. And since all universities are playing this game to one degree or another, it's asking quite a lot for one univesity to unilaterally agree to disarm.

The other "brand" that universities care about is the their reputation by their professor's peers when it comes to hiring the best talent for their departments, and with the granting agencies who are deciding which research proposals they should fund. And here, what matters is the peer-reviewed publications at various academic journals and conferences. Whether a university's press office puts out a press release, which then gets mangled by various newspapers, doesn't really have negative or positive effect when it comes to how a university's research work is measured by the People Who Really Matter --- namely, other professors and the people who dispense the cash. Hacker News falls into neither of these two categories.

I dunno about the findings from the 60s, but non-moving rotors would not keep a helicopter in the air... so at least some progress.

It's not clear whether this thing can steer (by changing ion balance?), if this prototype can't but the concept might, or if it's forward only. If they can steer (change direction at will) without moving parts, that definitely sounds innovative.

Or perhaps, as is becoming pretty ubiquitous in tech: the people who communicate things don't have nearly as much understanding as the people who do them. It was not always this way, but it seems the communication department in an organization is becoming the dumping ground for people who flunked out of doing the hands-on hard work but for one reason or another, have some support to retain them.

Note: I'm not criticizing tech writing. Just what tech writing has become.

This made it to the cover of Nature with a similar headline [0]. I guess that they are also "overhyping everything".

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsmahXYXoAAkaoI?format=jpg&name=...

That same Nature cover has an overyhyped BS headline about quantum computers and cryptocurrency.

The OP article explains.

The new device flies with no moving parts and with onboard power.

"On the performance of electrohydrodynamic propulsion" [2013]:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2012...

A reference mentioned in the Nature article [0] above, has a good overview of the Mathematics.

It also mentions a UK patent from 1928 I did not see mentioned from the MIT Nature article:

"Brown TT. 1928 A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion. UK Patent no. GB300311 (A)." : https://patents.google.com/patent/GB300311A/en

Did any of these have moving parts?

At least the one from 1964 in the linked YouTube video doesn't.

Lifters typically have a tether don’t they? So I think it depends on whether you consider the tether a moving part. It has to move for the craft to move…

A self contained unit like the MIT one is an improvement on the lifter, because the ion drive is itself an improvement on the lifter. Or at least, a production version of one. What they’ve done is get the mass to thrust ratio below a threshold that allows for flight in atmosphere. That’s definitely worth some points, but not all the points.

The tether is there to supply power and hold it down. Lifters require a power to weight ratio greater than one, which probably isn't possible with an on-board power supply. This MIT plane integrates the power supply and uses wing lift to reduce the required power, just as all planes do, and as the ionic propulsion planes did before (as others have linked to).

This is just the MIT press department embarrassing themselves again, or perhaps proving that sensationalism is a required part of science/funding these days.

One is self propelled and the other is a toy that was abandoned 60 years ago as unworkable.

That doesn’t sound the same to me.

I think you misread. I wasn't comparing the lifter to a plane, I was comparing other ionic propulsion planes to their plane.

> and as the ionic propulsion planes did before (as others have linked to).

Ground effect planes and to a lesser extent gliders are cheating and we can’t forget that.

But taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum and making it work at sea level is not nothing. I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick. It’s part parlor trick for sure, but the sort that opens wallets.

> to a lesser extent gliders are cheating

How were they cheating? Lifters don't use ground effect at all. With a proper power supply, they have a power/weight ratio much greater than one. Does a helicopter or F22 Raptor cheat to fly?

> taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum

You misunderstand what this is. This ionizes air and accelerates it towards a surface with opposite charge. This design will not work in a vacuum, since it requires atmosphere [1] as a propellant. I built one of these thrusters when I was a kid using an old TV power supply. It takes some wire, aluminum foil, tens of thousands of volts, and a stomach for inefficiency (for example, the mentioned plane has a thrust of 6.25N/kW, the motor/prop on a drone is nearly 10x that). The only difference between a lifter and this is the direction of thrust, and the use of wings to supply lift, which all aircraft with a power to weight ratio less than 1.0 necessarily do. The accomplishment, and it is impressive, is the engineering to make it all light/efficient, given the terrible efficiency of these types of motors, while using the advancements in the energy density of batteries to allow it to be integrated.

> I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick

I don't understand this. I don't think anyone is saying it's a parlor trick. It's impressive engineering. I just don't think it's accurate to say it's the first [2]. 20 years ago, there were sites with people attaching these to gliders (although, I can't find them anymore).

1. Theory of operation for the generation of the thrust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft#Electro...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft#cite_no...

> This is just the MIT press department embarrassing themselves again.

Is the MIT press department capable of being embarrassed? Maybe they embarrass MIT, or at least people associated with MIT, but I don't think they embarrass themselves or they'd have changed their behavior.

The one I built when I was a kid didn't. I don't know of any designs that do.

I did the same! IIRC, I went off a design from the first edition of Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius[0]. Excellent book for the budding electronics hacker.

[0] https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Electronic-Gad...

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