So it has four rotors.

Cockpit, propeller, engine.

So in this picture you see that rotor four is spinning faster and rotor two is spinning slower.

Oars are not supposed to look like this.

And then finally, if you spin opposite pairs of rotors faster than the other pair, then the robot yaws about the vertical axis.

Oars are your only means of propulsion.

You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels.

The distributed foot, actually, is working more like a paddle.

So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry.

If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers.

So these are helicopters with four rotors and they're roughly a meter or so in scale and weigh several pounds.

If you increase the speed of each of these rotors, then the robot flies up, it accelerates up.

And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars.

And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward.

All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across.

And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits.

It's actually functioning as a paddle even though it's interacting with a surface that we normally think of as a solid.

Though they were the two pulling on the oars, there were three voices in that boat, the echo of coach Robin Williams ever present as they powered to a second successive Olympic gold in the women's pairs, the first females in the annals of British sport to scale such a height.

And despite the aerodynamic interactions of these propeller blades, they're able to maintain stable flight.

So here's RHex with paddles, now converted into an incredibly maneuverable swimming robot.

So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it.

That's nothing new that's a propeller clock that's the rims that you can buy for your car.

So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on.

And they've already found that by being more intelligent about better propeller design, you can reduce that noise by 90 percent.

Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those.

We weren't looking for fireworks today, we were just looking to do a good row and to go out and win that race, which we did.

In a helicopter you feel and it's still a remarkable sensation you feel like you're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane.

This is the place that Captain Cook discovered in 1777 and he described a huge abundance of sharks biting the rudders and the oars of their small boats while they were going ashore.

James Kofi Annan He was hit with a paddle in the head. And this reminds me of my childhood when I used to work here.

So an on board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed and combines these motions and figures out what commands to send to the motors 600 times a second.

From the first stroke to the last, 220 punishing heaves into history, Helen Glover and Heather Stanning found added meaning in their golden moment at the Estacio da Lagoa.

And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.

People have been struggling for years to try and design a very fast rotating boat propeller that doesn't cavitate and literally wear away the metal and put holes in it, just like these pictures show.

As a youngster, I was very interested in model airplanes, ornithopters, autogyros, helicopters, gliders, power planes, indoor models, outdoor models, everything, which I just thought was a lot of fun, and wondered why most other people didn't share my same enthusiasm with them.

Paul MacCready If we could have the second video, the one minute, put in as quickly as you can, which this will show the Pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in Hawaii, and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown.

And then, navy pilot training, and, after college, I got into sailplane flying, power plane flying, and considered the sailplanes as a sort of hobby and fun, but got tangled up with some great professor types, who convinced me and everybody else in the field that this was a good way to get into really deep science.

This is emblematic of it this is wing dining, recalling those balmy summer days somewhere over France in the 20s, dining on the wing of a plane. You can't see it very well here, but that's Hemingway reading some pages from his new novel to Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford until the slipstream blows him away.

Controversy over the deployment by the US Marines of 12 tilt rotor V 22 Osprey aircraft to the Futenma Air Base on Okinawa has contributed to the alliance s decay. The hybrid aircraft which combine a helicopter s ability to take off and land vertically with the range, loading capacity, fuel efficiency, and speed of a turboprop airplane are instrumental to deter possible Chinese or North Korean aggression in the area.