♫ A Whole New Wooooooooorld ♫: Scientists Develop Real Flying Carpet Out Of Plastic

Because there isn't a pauper-prince alive who hasn't dreamed of taking a princess out for a magic carpet ride with the hope of later rocking her casbah, scientists at Princeton University (my alma mater! Jk jk, I went to Virginia Tech) have successfully developed a thin plastic sheet that can "swim" through the air the way skates and rays swim through the ocean. Me? Not without a shark cage and water wings on!

The 10cm (4in) sheet of smart transparency is driven by "ripple power"; waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front to rear underneath.

The prototype, described in Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of about a centimetre per second.

Improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a metre per second.

With the current status of the project, it would take a carpet at least 50-meters wide to support a human. That's...a little big. And only strong enough for one person. I'm gonna need to support two people. Plus a tiger.

Hit the jump for a crappy video of Princeton's flying carpet, then one of the fully functional model from Aladdin.

'Flying carpet' of conductive plastic takes flight [bbcnews]

Thanks to Megoo and Rev Dr Dom, who would settle for magic carpets that don't leave stains when their cats miss the litter box.

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