Guardian:
Engineers from the UK's largest defense company, BAE Systems,
are using defense technology to help the British Olympic team.
Among their successes is a device called Drake that they
invented for the sailing team. Drake can model vast amounts of
meteorological data by taking and processing readings of the
key weather factors, including wind speed and direction and
temperature and humidity changes, writes Alok Jha for the
Guardian. For the bobsledding team, BAE recruited PhD
students to devise a method of customizing each sled for
individual athletes. The BAE engineers' next goal is to improve
the racing wheelchair used by Paralympians—by using an
Airbus wind tunnel to study the wheelchair's construction and
determine the best seating position for different types of
races.
