Igor Pasternak of World Aeros wants to be the first to harness helium for multi-ton deliveries, proving to the world that airships (the preferred term) have a bright future in commercial cargo. Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

They’re light and take off and land vertically, making airships an energy-efficient way to carry big loads to out-of-the-way places — without having to build runways or roads first — at a quarter the cost of regular cargo planes.

Their Aeroscraft has a cargo capacity of up to 250 tons (three times that of the C-17), and its design solves a century-old problem:

Traditional blimps, like birthday balloons, are great at rising but not so good at returning to earth. Lacking buoyancy control, they have to be tethered by a crew after landing. The drawback makes large cargo deliveries virtually impossible: Any weight that’s offloaded has to be replaced with an equally heavy load — say, of sand or lead — for the craft to keep its equilibrium.

To tackle that problem, Aeros engineers created a “variable buoyancy” system that pumps helium out of the main chamber and into lightweight compression tanks in the hull. The compressed gas makes room for the ship to take on more air, allowing for a slow descent.

This concept isn’t new but was considered impractical because of weight. But now there are lightweight materials like the carbon-fiber tubes that make up Aeroscraft’s skeleton and the aluminum honeycomb panels in its frame. Also, laminated fabric pouches, instead of titanium tanks, are used for pressurized helium.

A test flight is planned for this year. Pasternak estimates $3 billion will be needed to build a fleet of 24 ships, which he wants to lease to companies or governments. The U.S. Department of Defense has committed $60 million, and private investment is being sought.

If Aeroscraft really does fly, cargo operators, along with oil and wind power companies, could become airship customers. But “people just don’t take them seriously,” says Paul Adams of Airship Journal. To secure investors and establish a new market, Pasternak must overcome the “giggle factor.”

[Via Businessweek]

Image: Aeroscraft

Sometimes the amazing, innovative products on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter sound too good to be true. And when it comes to the “world’s first Japanese kobe beef jerky” that’s beer fed, 100 percent organic, and marketed as the “best beef jerky on the planet,” your instincts are right, it is too good to be true.

But a fairly well put together Kickstarter campaign nearly had more than 3,000 people duped out of a collective $120,000, as Christopher Mims reports at Quartz.

So how did this fradulent project nearly succeed? As Mims points out, the service generally relies on users to flag suspicious campaigns. But fake taste-tester reviews, an extensive Kickstarter page, and unsuspecting press coverage nearly fooled everyone until days before the campaign was set to end — and the credit cards of the backers would have been charged. Fortunately, A group of filmmakers working on a documentary on Kickstarter helped expose the scam. Here’s what they found:

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As with any investment, projects don’t always pan out. But large scale fraud on Kickstarter is a major concern, even if it’s hard to tell the difference for the site’s users.

So far Kickstarter hasn’t had to deal with a large-scale fraud cases like this would have been. But that challenge will always be there and will only increase if scammers can improve their pitch. So be careful what you back.

Kickstarter almost enabled a $120,000 fraud, and it’s not the first [Quartz]

The U.S. government’s covert national security electronic surveillance program, known as PRISM, has heightened the public’s very appropriate concerns over privacy. And that has folks flocking to private search engine DuckDuckGo.

The search engine, which vows not to track its users, has experienced record traffic in the past week as the news story revealing the existence of the PRISM program continues to unfold.

The site’s traffic jumped 28 percent from 1,835,599 direct searches on June 6 when the story broke to 2,350,762 on Wednesday (hat tip VentureBeat).

DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google. But unlike Google, the company doesn’t track users. Which means, DuckDuckGo doesn’t know who its users are and the site doesn’t tie their searches together. The company also vows to not put users in a filter bubble.

Gabriel Weinberg (pictured) founded DuckDuckGo in 2008 in an effort to create a better search experience. Meaning, less spam, less intrusive advertising and better instant answers.

The company backed into the issue of privacy after Weinberg was asked about it and thought it was “a little creepy that a search engine could know so much about you and also didn’t want to hand over information to governments,” Weinberg told Bloomberg in a June 10 interview.

More from DuckDuckGo on its policy:

When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.

Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.

Photo: DuckDuckGo

If you get the flu the Centers for Disease Control in the United States recommends staying home for 24 hours after your fever breaks. Unfortunately, for many workers that’s not an option. But what would happen if it was and all workers had access to paid sick time?

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health found that giving all employees in the workplace access to paid sick leave resulted in — surprise, surprise — reduced rates of influenza infection. Using a modeling system developed by the school to simulate an influenza epidemic in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, the researchers estimate that universal access to paid sick days would reduce the number of flu cases in the workplace by 6 percent.

And an even more effective way to reduce the flu in the work place? “Flu days,” sick days specifically designed to encourage employees to stay home when they have the flu. If all employees have access to one flu day it results in a 25 percent reduction in flu infections through workplace transmission. Two flu days leads to a 40 percent reduction. Researchers found that flu days were most effective when used as a policy in large companies with more than 500 employees.

“These findings make a strong case for paid sick days,” said Dr. Supriya Kumar, the study’s lead author. “Future research should examine the economic impacts of paid sick-day policies.”

While we don’t have an economic analysis, the flu can limit working abilities of otherwise healthy adults by days or even weeks. That’s a loss of productivity, but if businesses can limit it to individuals instead of entire teams or the entire company it seems like an obvious solution for employee health and the bottom line.

[via Science Daily]

Photo: Flickr/jessleecuizon