Orbiting gas station could refuel lunar missions

FORGET huge, expensive rockets. A plan being examined by a US government panel would allow smaller, cheaper rockets to fly to the moon and beyond by stopping off at an "orbiting gas station".

The panel convened by order of the White House to assess NASA's plans for the future of human space flight - including the project to send people back to the moon by 2020 - is pondering a radical idea to set up orbiting depots at which relatively small, inexpensive rockets could stop off to pick up fuel.

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Robotics insights through flies' eyes

The fly's brain is hardly bigger than a pinhead, too small by far to enable the fly's feats if it functioned exactly the way the human brain does. It must have a simpler and more efficient way of processing images from the eyes into visual perception, and that is a subject of intense interest for robot builders. Even today, robots have great difficulty perceiving their surroundings through their cameras, and even more difficulty making sense of what they see.

The way flies process the images from their immobile eyes is completely different from they way the human brain processes visual signals. Movements in space produce so-called "optical flux fields" that characterize specific kinds of motion definitively.

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LM Aegis BMD Weapon System Intercepts Ballistic Missile Target

Lockheed Martin's (NYSE: LMT) Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) System today destroyed a ballistic missile target in an at-sea firing under operationally realistic conditions. The event also successfully demonstrated two new capabilities on other ships. These tests mark the continued successful engineering development of the next generational upgrade in Aegis BMD capability.

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Blu-ray Burner Turns Your Desktop Into a Spin Zone

If your hard drive is running out of room to store all the movies, music and software you've accumulated, maybe it's time to get a Blu-ray burner. With the ability to store up to 50 GB on each $3.50 disc, backing up your bootlegs has never been cheaper.

Consider the Mercury Pro 8X Blu-ray Pioneer BDR-203 External. Engineering geeks at OWC packed the utilitarian box with four different interfaces: Firewire 400, Firewire 800, eSATA and USB 2.0, even including the cables for each. Backward-compatible for every type of DVD and CD writable and playable format, it works equally well on Macs (OS X 10.3 and higher) and Windows PCs (XP/Vista).

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Tougher alloys for titanium tanks

Military vehicles could be armoured with titanium alloys better able to withstand bullets and explosions in the future.

The tougher material is the intended result of research being conducted by Prof Wei Sha at Queen's University's School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering.

Sha is developing computer models that will reveal the reasons why titanium deforms and retains damage from strong impacts and fast applied forces.

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Nature-inspired compound

The large-scale production of hydrogen from water and sunlight could be possible with a new catalytic system that takes inspiration from nature.

The five-year research project - sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - will create a compound that mimics the active site of the enzyme organisms used to convert hydrogen ions to hydrogen gas during anaerobic (without oxygen) respiration.

If successful, the project could provide a springboard towards large-scale water photolysis (converting light energy to chemical energy) for a sustainable hydrogen economy.

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Fossil Fuels without the Fossils?

A theory long on the fringes of petroleum science gained some support from new research this week, but it is probably not enough to launch the concept into the mainstream.

The idea: What if fossil fuels were not fossil after all? What if hydrocarbons could form from chemical reactions deep inside the earth, rather than from the "pressure cooking" of organic matter?

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Blackout Bomb: Air Force's High-Powered Microwave Weapons Fry Enemy Equipment

In modern warfare, where missions are sometimes over in minutes, a blind enemy is a defeated enemy. The electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon detonated miles aboveground would zap an army’s surveillance equipment, but not without causing heavy collateral damage. Instead, a new Air Force tool will fry electronics using high-power microwaves emitted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

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How Software Found the Air France Wreckage

When Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro disappeared over the Atlantic in the early hours of 1 June, search and rescue teams had to look for survivors in an area almost as big as Great Britain. Not knowing exactly where the Airbus 330-200 went down, French and Brazilian authorities turned to new software developed for the U.S. Coast Guard that uses the location of debris to look back in time to estimate the most likely site of an accident.

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The LED's Dark Secret

The blue light-emitting diode, arguably the greatest optoelectronic advance of the past 25 years, harbors a dark secret: Crank up the current and its efficiencies will plummet. The problem is known as droop, and it’s not only puzzling the brightest minds in the field, it’s also threatening the future of the electric lighting industry.

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Trident II D5 Missile Achieves 127 Successful Test Flights

The U.S. Navy supported the May 26 launch of a U.K. Royal Navy Trident II D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM) built by Lockheed Martin. The unarmed missile was launched from the submerged Royal Navy submarine HMS Victorious (UK SSBN 06) in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Trident II D5 missile now has achieved 127 consecutive successful test flights since 1989 - a record unmatched by any other large ballistic missile or space launch vehicle.

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Safety of combat military vehicles examined

A Queen's University Belfast academic is working on research that could help protect the lives of military based in Afghanistan.
Professor Wei Sha from Queen's School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering has been testing how safe vehicles with titanium alloys are when attacked by bullets or explosions.

Professor Sha's research examines the damage tolerance of the popular material titanium. It is the first research of its kind to reveal the reasons behind the deformation and damage of titanium alloys under strong impact or fast applied force.

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Researchers Develop “Brain-Reading” Methods to Uncover a Person’s Mental State

The brain perceives information before it reaches a person’s awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

Scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness.

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Tech Smoothes Way to Cheaper Electronics

A new technique to produce ultra-smooth metal surfaces could secure a future of sensitive medical detectors, more efficient solar cells and faster computers, according to new research published today in the journal Science.

The key to this new technique is a five-minute epoxy that could actually be found at a local hardware store.

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Raytheon Awarded $16 M for Aegis Radar Contracts

The U.S. Navy has awarded Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) two contracts that extend the company's legacy of performance and support for the Aegis weapons system.Under the contracts, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) will provide an AN/SPY-1 radar transmitter ordnance alteration kit to enhance the radar's processing performance and multi-mission capability. The company will also continue its performance-based logistics support, including spares and repairs for Aegis weapons systems used by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Raytheon will also manage system repairs in support of foreign military sales.

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U.S. Suspends Delivery on GPS-Guided 155mm Shells

The U.S. Army has temporarily suspended delivery of Raytheon's GPS-guided, 155mm Excalibur artillery rounds due to problems with its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), service officials said.

"The XM982 [Excalibur] round is required to operate in an environment that exceeds 15,000 times the force of gravity. There was an inherent lack of design robustness in the qualified IMU configuration which resulted in a failure rate of approximately five percent.

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Barracuda UAV Returns to the Air

EADS Defence & Security has resumed flight tests of its Barracuda UAV, following the loss of the first prototype. The Barracuda, dubbed "the largest UAV ever built in Europe" by the manufacturer, has been test-flown from CFB Goose Bay, Canada.

In the course of four flights, the Barracuda flew autonomously along preprogrammed routes over Newfoundland and Labrador. A data link to a ground station was maintained for flight safety purposes.

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Out of Whole Cloth: Tarian Rocket Protection

Working with Britain’s Ministry of Defense, a transatlantic firm named AmSafe has come up with a novel solution to anti-tank rockets: fabric panels mounted on the sides of trucks and armored vehicles.

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Details of the Ares I Upper Stage

The committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight is listening to Ares I team members describe how the rocket will work. They must convince the independent panel of experts that the rocket's design is safe and reliable, and that Ares I should be the vehicle the U.S. uses to send humans to the moon and eventually Mars.

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Russian Navy ends first stage of Nerpa sub trials in Far East

The first stage of new sea trials of Russia's Nerpa nuclear attack submarine, which was damaged in a fatal accident in previous tests, has been successfully completed, the Amur shipyard said on Monday.

The vessel resumed sea trials on July 10 in the Sea of Japan following extensive repairs.

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Self-Healing Wiring May Be Future Electrical Standard

elf-healing wire technology, developed as part of an FAA initiative to combat the problems associated with aging aircraft, has been licensed to Ohio-based Pinnacle Systems–its first commercial licensee. As part of a suite of research projects at the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) aimed at eliminating the time-consuming task of tracing wire faults, wire that can repair its own insulation after it is damaged was developed by research chemist Robert Kauffman.

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Air Force tests anti-ground C-130 laser

An Air Force C-130 incinerated a dummy ground target by firing a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser at White Sands Missile Range, N.M, during a June 13 test of the service’s Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), Boeing officials said.

“We fired the laser in-flight. We hit a target board on the ground,” said Gary Fitzmire, vice president of Boeing’s directed energy systems.

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Total Recall: Pentagon Looks to ‘Optimize’ Troops’ Minds

The U.S. military is racing to master the mind. Last year, Pentagon researchers kick-started a program to replicate a cat’s brain. In April, they requested proposals that would reproduce a monkey mind — and then test its neural pathways to understand brain damage. They’re even trying to create an entirely new model for human cognition that’s based on thermodynamics; your brain as heat energy.

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Organic LED

Silicon Valley-based SRI International and the Japanese firm SDK have produced an efficient organic light-emitting diode (OLED) light source that could one day replace incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs.

A combination of SDK's light-emitting polymer materials and SRI's cavity organic light-emitting diode (COLED) technology has enabled researchers to achieve an output of 30 lumen per watt for blue light – higher than any other reported polymer OLED device.

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Point Blank, DuPont launch new armor line

U.S. company Point Blank Solutions Inc. in collaboration with DuPont Protection Technologies announced the launch of new ballistic armor systems.

Point Blank Solutions announced the release of its Hi-Lite XP ballistic armor integrated with DuPont's Kevlar XP woven fabric technologies for a new protective body armor system. Tennessee-based Protective Apparel Corporation of America is also releasing its Perform XP armor system with the DuPont woven fabric.

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Raytheon's GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II Completes Captive Flight Testing

Raytheon Company completed a series of captive carry flight tests of its proposed solution for the GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II competition, demonstrating the weapon's form-factored seeker is ready for guided test shots.

"The test series demonstrated our form-factored tri-mode seeker and guidance receiver navigator are ready to enter the engineering and manufacturing development phase," said Harry Schulte, vice president of Raytheon Missile System's Air Warfare Systems' product line. "We have proved the technical readiness of a superior and affordable solution."

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Navy Reveals Details of Submarine-Based Drones

Between scientists warning of autonomous killer robots and a Predator drone killing Osama bin Laden's son, news about killer robots has been eating up a lot of bandwidth lately. But most of that press has focused on the Air Force's Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Well, the Air Force needs to make some room in the spotlight, because the Navy's getting in on the act, too.

In an oddly revealing interview, Rear Admiral Mark Kenny, the head of the Navy's irregular warfare operations, not only stated that the Navy's submarines have been equipped with unmanned vehicles, but even detailed which vehicles and how they are used.

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Laser-Powered Lightcraft "At the Cusp of Commercial Reality"

Future business travelers may literally ride a laser to work. The U.S. and Brazilian Air Forces are experimenting with Lightcraft technology that could become part of your daily commute, using plain old air to fuel 45-minute transcontinental jaunts.

The design uses a ground-based laser to beam the Lightcraft skyward on a series of blast waves. A parabolic mirror on the back of the craft would capture and focus the pulsing laser beam so that it heats air to 5 times the sun's temperature, creating mini-explosions that propel human passengers or cargo to any point on the planet in under an hour, or into orbit.

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Nextreme and Lockheed cooperate on next-generation thermal management

Nextreme Thermal Solutions (Durham, NC), provider of microscale thermal and power management products for the electronics industry (see "Thin-film thermoelectric technology makes optoelectronics 'cool'"), and Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MD) entered into a cooperation agreement to develop new products based on Nextreme's thin-film thermoelectric materials. Lockheed Martin will use Nextreme's thin-film thermoelectric products and thermal and power management design services in solutions it is developing for government and civil applications. Lockheed Martin was recently in the news for its acquisition of Gyrocam Systems.

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Thinnest semiconductor laser holds promise for on-chip interconnects

Semiconductor lasers with thicknesses down to 80 nm have been built by researchers at Arizona State University (ASU; Tempe, AZ) and the Technical University of Eindhoven (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).1 The work opens up possibilities for using nanoscale lasers in optical integrated circuits to significantly improve the performance of computers and speed up Internet access.

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Fiber Lasers for Extreme Photons

The light sources powering the next-generation chipmaking technique, extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), are too dim, according to industry experts. And that’s one of the main reasons why semiconductor manufacturers worry that the technology will not be ready to produce advanced chips a few years from now. But Almantas Galvanauskas, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, believes he has a way to boost their power by using a type of industrial laser called a fiber laser. He presented his research two weeks ago at the International Workshop on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography, in Honolulu.

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Lockheed Martin Rolls Out the F-35C

The U.S. Navy's first stealth fighter, F-35C rolled-out in a ceremony at Lockheed Martin's Ft. Worth TX facility July 28, 2009. Following the ceremonial roll-out the first F-35C, designated CF-1, will undergo a series of ground tests before its first flight, scheduled for late 2009. The aircraft is the ninth F-35 test aircraft to join the F-35 test fleet.

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Space Elevator Contest Held Up

A technical issue with a helicopter cable system is forcing the Spaceward Foundation to postpone the Space Elevator Power Beaming Challenge Games originally scheduled for this summer at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center.

The Spaceward Foundation, which conducts the competition as part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, together with NASA, which is providing the $2 million prize money for this segment, said the problems cropped up during tests of the helicopter-mounted cable system last week.

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Future USAF Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Technology

Future United States Air Force UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technology forms the subject of a recently-issued report covering the next four decades of envisaged US military airpower capabilities. The report - titled the 'Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 - describes how UAVs are planned to figure within overall US military airborne capabilities, putting them into brand new contexts and giving them new roles such as air-to-air refuelling, the ability to operate in large scale air assaults and to operate autonomously, calling the shots in terms of deciding the decisive moment to unleash their weapons loads.

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Northrop Grumman Awarded Navy Contract to Study Air and Missile Defense Radar Concepts

Northrop Grumman Corporation has been awarded a $10 million firm-fixed price U.S. Navy contract to analyze and provide system concept studies for the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), a next generation radar system planned for the U.S. Navy's CG(X) and Future Surface Combatant platforms.

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In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.

Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

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France Launches Minehunting UUV Effort

The Délégation Générale pour l'Armement (DGA), the French government's arms procurement office, has awarded a contract for an undisclosed amount to DCNS, ECA and Thales to study the use of unmanned underwater vehicles in mine countermeasures (MCM), DCNS said July 28.

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ASDS Mini-Sub Program Sinks, As Replacement Rises

In a program that began with great promise but soon spiraled out of control, Northrop Grumman has been building ASDS “Advanced SEAL delivery System” mini-subs as successors to the previous SDV (SEAL/Swimmer Delivery Vehicle) carried on US Benjamin Franklin class (SSBN-640) attack submarines.

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AEDC reaches major milestone with hypersonic engine testing

A 10-year effort to upgrade a high speed, high temperature, blow-down ground test facility at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) culminated in a recent hypersonic Mach 6 test run on a state-of-the-art combined-cycle engine demonstrator.

"This test was significant," said Matthew Bond, test manager of AEDC's Aerodynamic and Propulsion Test Unit (APTU). "The Mach 6 run on June 24 was the first-ever scramjet propulsion test at AEDC.

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'Brain Carpet' Translates Thoughts Into Action

Instead of violently shoving a giant needle into the brain a la "The Matrix," Utah scientists are reading thoughts by carpeting the brain with microelectrodes.

This "modest advance," as the scientists describe it, could enable more precise control of prosthetic limbs or advance research in epilepsy and other diseases of the brain.

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Raytheon Ground Soldier Ensemble Achieves Initial Program Milestones

Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) Ground Soldier Ensemble team completed two major program milestones and is moving to demonstrate networked tactical situational awareness and digital communications capabilities for the dismounted warfighter.

Raytheon's GSE team delivered to the U.S. Army the first open frame hardware on schedule in June, and earlier that month, held its first preliminary design review.

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Aluminum Blasted With X-Ray Laser Reveals New Transparent State of Matter

German researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg decided to roast a piece of aluminum foil with a 10-million-gigawatt X-ray laser. They heated the foil so hot that it became a new matter state: transparent aluminum. It's also believed to be the same state of matter that comprises the core of planets, such as Jupiter.

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DARPA Readies an Ultra-Fast Mini-Sub

The DARPA program, first announced in 2006, has finally reached the testing phase. Electric Boat, the company contracted to design the Underwater Express, is producing a quarter-scale model of the speedy sub, to be tested next year off the coast of Rhode Island.

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Blazepoint launches new Tactical Tablet PC

launched a new Tactical Tablet PC for military and commercial applications.
The new range of the ndura RUGGED® Tactical Tablet PC’s incorporate the Intel® Atom™ processor.

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A Quest for Batteries to Alter the Energy Equation

In a gleaming white factory here, Bob Peters was gently feeding sheets of chemical-coated foil one afternoon recently into a whirring machine that cut them into precise rectangles. It was an early step in building a new kind of battery, one smaller than a cereal box but with almost as much energy as the kind in a conventional automobile.

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Arrow 2 test failure a 'serious setback

The failure of an upgraded Arrow 2 missile interceptor in a test off the Californian coast was seen as a serious setback for Israel's main defense system at a time when Iran is accelerating its long-range ballistic missile program.

The Arrow test scheduled for July 22 was aborted on three occasions because of technical malfunctions, including communications glitches between the missile and its Israel-developed Green Pine radar, according to Israel and U.S. accounts.

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Nasa explains its Mars voyage strategies

Nasa has detailed how a hypothetical manned mission to Mars would work. But while that’s a dream, the agency is funding attempts to use private firms to cut the costs of space travel.

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Researchers develop 'brain-reading' methods

It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person's awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person's mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

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US Firm Shown Television Running on Wireless Powe

US firm Witricity developed a system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires. He showed off a commercially available television using the system. This system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

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Barcode replacement shown off

A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

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DOD Completes Large-Scale Tests of Mesh-Networking Tags

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) recently completed large-scale tests of mesh-network location-tracking asset tags from ARINC and Impeva Labs. The tests involved hundreds of battery-powered asset tags that formed secure local mesh networks spanning up to half a mile in length.

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Military spends $155M for the nucleus of future wireless networks

The central component to the military’s bulletproof IP wireless network strategy is now in place. Raytheon this week was awarded $24.4 million of what could end up being a $155 million contract to develop the key technology, known as MAINGATE, that will link disparate military wireless networks.

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U.S. company hopes to make fuel from sunlight, CO2

U.S. start-up Joule Biotechnologies hopes to make commercial amounts of motor fuel by feeding engineered organisms high concentrations of carbon dioxide and sunlight, its top executive said.

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Western Digital Rolls Out First 1TB Laptop HHD

It certainly didn't take long for somebody to roar past Toshiba's short-lived record of 500GB for the largest available laptop storage capacity, announced on May 14.

Western Digital on July 27 introduced two new laptop drives that knocked Toshiba's Portege R600-ST4203 solid-state laptop out of the No. 1 spot: the WD Scorpio Blue drives, available in both 750GB and 1TB capacities.

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New B-2 Radar Meets Mission Requirements

Northrop Grumman Corporation and the U.S. Air Force have successfully demonstrated that the new radar developed for the B-2 stealth bomber can fulfill the performance requirements for its required missions, both conventional and strategic.

Northrop Grumman is the Air Force's prime contractor for the B-2, the flagship of the nation's long range strike arsenal. The bomber is the nation's largest payload, longest range stealth bomber.

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Piezo power on the battlefield

Soldiers could one day power electronic devices such as personal radios using just their own movements on the battlefield.The technology is being developed through a two-year government-sponsored programme that aims to create kinetic-energy harvesting systems that can be worn by army personnel.

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How robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare

Barely an hour's drive from the casinos of Las Vegas, a group of unassuming buildings have become as important as the trenches were to WWI. The big difference? Today's warriors are fighting without getting in harm's way, using drones to attack targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There are now more than 7,000 UAVs ranging from the workhorse, the Predator, and its beefier, deadlier kin the Reaper, to army drones like the tiny hand-launched Raven and the larger Shadow.

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Is the ocean Florida's untapped energy source?

The answer to easing the energy crunch in one of the nation's most populous states could lie underwater.

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University are in the early stages of turning that idea into reality in the powerful Gulf Stream off the state's eastern shore.

"If you can take an engine and put it on the back of a boat or propel a ship through water, why not take a look at the strength of the Gulf Stream and determine if that can actually turn a device and create energy?

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Boyd Bushman Part 3

Boyd Bushman Part 2

Boyd Bushman Part 1

Boyd Bushman on Anti Gravity

Future Weapons: Mercury Round

Active Denial Microwave Weapons

Scramjets promise space travel for all

Advanced technology is also breathing fresh life into winged spacecraft. The buzz centres on a hypersonic engine known asa supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet. Despite the name, scramjets are very different to the turbojet engines that power commercial aircraft, not least because scramjet-powered vehicles must first be accelerated to Mach 4 or so using jet engines or rockets before their scramjets can work. This is because, unlike turbojets, scramjets do not use spinning blades to compress the air entering the engine. Instead, the high speed of the vehicle compresses the incoming air, which is then fed into a combustion chamber where the burning fuel creates an exhaust jetthat exits the engine faster than the air that entered.

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Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky

THE Pentagon's enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversialActive Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee.

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Electricity From Salty Water

A device that gleans usable energy from the mixing of salty and fresh waters has been developed by University of Milan-Bicocca physicist Doriano Brogioli. If scaled up, the technology could potentially power coastal homes, though some scientists caution that such an idea might not be realistic.

Extracting clean, fresh water from salty water requires energy. The reverse processmixing fresh water and salty waterreleases energy. Physicists began exploring the idea of extracting energy from mixing fresh and salty waters, a process known as salination, in the 1970s. They found that the energy released by the worlds freshwater rivers as they flowed into salty oceans was comparable to "each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high," according to a 1974 research paper in the journal Science. But those who have chased the salination dream have collided with technological barriers.

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First Flapping, Two-Winged Aircraft Takes Flight

The world's first successful flight of a self-powered, rudderless, flapping aircraft has been achieved by engineers from AeroVironment.

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Raytheon to Give Tomahawk a New Edge

Raytheon scored a Navy contract worth more than $12.8 million to create a new warhead for the Tomahawk missile. Program officials with the company say the workhorse cruise missile will be fit with a warhead that can crack hardened targets and that could turn the Tomahawk into an intelligent ship-killer

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Air Force Drones: Are Fighter Pilots Obsolete?

If you think drone aircraft are all the rage at the U.S. Air Force, just wait a few years. The men in the Pentagon who look into the future believe UAVs --Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or pilotless planes -- are the future.

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High-Energy Laser Could Protect US Navy Ships From Small Attack Boats

The ultra-precision of high-energy lasers soon may be the pinpoint, measured response that will keep threats a safe distance from U.S. Navy ships.

Under a new Navy initiative called the Maritime Laser Demonstration, Northrop Grumman will apply its solid-state laser systems expertise and successes to demonstrate a laser weapon system to defeat a wide range of current threats.

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Proper Fit Of Massive Penetrator Weapon On B-2 Bomber Verified

Northrop Grumman has moved the U.S. Air Force a critical step closer to being able to drop a from the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. 30,000 pound penetrator weapon On April 28, an Air Force team, a Northrop Grumman-led aircraft contractor team and a Boeing-led weapon contractor team verified that the equipment required to integrate the new Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) on the B-2 -- the hardware that holds the MOP inside the weapons bay, the weapon itself, and the hardware used by the aircrew to command and release the weapon -- will fit together properly inside the aircraft.

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Fujifilm unveils 3D Digital Camera

Japan’s Fujifilm unveiled a compact digital camera that can be used to shoot three-dimensional (3D) photos and movies that can be viewed without special glasses.

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UK Firm Aesir Showcases VTOL UAV Technology

A new range of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technologies has been showcased at an industry conference in the UK. Developed by Aesir Ltd, the range includes a number of new UAV designs, all of which have VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) capabilities, in a similar way to current piloted military aircraft designs liked the British Aerospace Harrier and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

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Problems prevent US Arrow launch test

The missile that the Israeli Arrow defense system was supposed to intercept in a failed drill on Thursday was an advanced version of the Iranian Shihab ballistic missile, which does not yet exist but will have superior radar-evading capabilities.

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Bulava Designer Quits After Missile Failure

The country’s top missile designer resigned Wednesday after the failed test-launch of a naval ballistic missile last week weakened Moscow’s negotiating position with Washington over a new arms treaty.

“Yury Solomonov has submitted a letter asking that he be relieved from his duties as the general director and chief designer of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology,” said Alexander Vorobyov, a spokesman for the Federal Space Agency, which oversees the top-secret institute.

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Cheap, Fast, Deadly: NETFIRES “Missiles in a Box”

The basic concept of NETFIRES (a Future Combat Systems program) is to develop a family of artillery-like precision attack missiles based upon a vertical launcher design. Yet the idea goes far beyond that simple description. The NETFIRES CLU box launcher is intended to be be fully autonomous, meaning it can be dropped off anywhere and operate on its own without a support vehicle. The launch unit includes power generation and control systems as well as a total of 15 missiles, each with a warhead similar in size and capability to a 155mm artillery shell.

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Aurora Supersonic Aircraft

X-43A Goes 7,000 MPH - Getting Ready for Mach 10

Electronic nose created to detect skin vapors

"The spectrum of the vapours emitted by human skin is dominated by fatty acids. These substances are not very volatile, but we have developed an 'electronic nose' able to detect them", Juan Fernández de la Mora, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University (United States) and co-author of a study recently published in the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, tells SINC.

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Fighting disease atom by atom

Researchers at Rice University and their international colleagues have for the first time described the atomic structure of the protein shell that carries the genetic code of hepatitis E (HEV). Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mean that new ways to stop the virus may come in the not-too-distant future.

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Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves

A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson's disease.

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Terahertz Transistor Could Usher in Era of Cheap Surveillance Video Cameras

New terahertz-detecting technology could make "intimate" body-search-at-a-distance cameras as cheap and easy as conventional video shots.

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Astrobotic Technology Reveals Robot Design To Survive Moon's Extreme Heat

Astrobotic Technology, in Pittsburgh, is developing a lunar robot, which they hope to put on the moon sometime in 2011.

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Aurora Flies VTOL Excalibur

Aurora Flight Sciences has flown its Excalibur experimental vertical takeoff and landing unmanned combat aircraft. The subscale proof-of-principle aircraft made its first hover at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland on June 24 .

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Bulava ( SS-NX-30 )

Deep Flight Super Falcon

Taiwan University Develops Natural Sunlight OLED

Researchers have developed an OLED with a color temperature range of 2,300-8,200k, which it claimed is the world’s first OLED that can provide light color close to natural sunlight.

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OEwaves to Develop an All-Optical Integrated Micro-Primary Atomic Clock (AO-IMPAC) for DARPA

OEwaves is awarded Phase 1 of a 3 phase contract to investigate and demonstrate a novel all-optical atomic clock using Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) optical resonator technology

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Can botnets be beaten?

This week, Georgia Tech unveiled BotSniffer, a prototype system designed to detect and disable botnets. Using traffic analysis the BotSniffer tries to identify botnet members by looking for command and control channels.Apparently the BotSniffer detector has been built as an independent plug-in for the popular open source intrusion detection system Snort. With a host system that’s as widely used as Snort, there could be a good possibility of such a system eventually making it in to the real-world.

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What Will NASA's Next Spacesuit Look Like?

Skintight spacesuits may look good in the recent Star Trek movie, but they don't fit NASA's future plans—not yet, anyway. The space agency has its sights set on a new spacesuit for astronauts returning to the moon within the next decade or so—a more traditional design that will seek to balance protection and mobility.

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Will Nano Traps Make Geothermal Power Earthquake-Safe?

Earth's molten mantle is a potentially inexhaustible source of energy that could meet 10 percent of our nation's energy needs, but cost and safety concerns have hampered the growth of geothermal energy. Now, researchers have announced plans to test a more efficient way to tap into safer, low-temperature geothermal stores using nanotechnology.

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New Personal Submarine Brings Airplane Tech Underwater

Graham Hawkes has spent most of his life creating new ways to plumb the ocean’s depths. Earlier this year he publicly unveiled his latest vehicle: a sleek, winged submersible dubbed the Deep Flight Super Falcon, which operates on principles of lift and drag, like an airplane.

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University scientists enter new phase of automotive laser ignition research with Ford

Following collaborative work with Ford Motor Company (Dearborn, MI) and GSI Group (Rugby, England), engineers at The University of Liverpool (England) have reported encouraging results in their quest for laser ignition (LI) in automobile engines. The approach offers the potential to address both increased fuel efficiency and reduced levels of harmful emissions.

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Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Still Beset by Problems

Researchers at this year’s International Workshop on EUV Lithography in Honolulu, are discussing new approaches to many of the intransigent problems that plague this long-anticipated yet still-not-ready chip-printing method. These include new ways of generating the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light, figuring out a better way to inspect nanometer-scale parts of the system, mitigating contamination generated by EUV light sources, and producing sharper nanometer-scale patterns on chips.

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ThermBright Thermal Weapon Targets used by British Forces in Afghanistan

ThermBright Targets used in Afghanistan with British Forces on Operation Herrick on a three day range training package.

The Thermal Weapon Targets were used for grouping and zeroing their thermal weapon sights, at Camp Bastion, followed by confirmation shooting practices. They then conducted a fire and manoeuvre shoot at night from vehicles at ranges out to 500m.

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Researchers Train Minds to Move Matter

Learning to move a computer cursor or robotic arm with nothing but thoughts can be no different from learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, according to a new study of how brains and machines interact.

The research, which was carried out in monkeys but is expected to apply to humans, involves a fundamental redesign of brain-machine experiments.

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New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct

A group of computer scientistsat the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud computing, and the cloud consists of the data — including e-mail and Web-based documents and calendars — stored on numerous servers.

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'Invisible' Building Design Could Reduce Earthquake Damage

Recently, physicists have been developing better and better invisibility cloaks, which hide an object from sight by causing incoming light waves to bend around the object, and come together behind the object.

Physicists Mohamed Farhat and Stefan Enoch of the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, and Sebastien Guenneau of LiverpoolUniversity in England wondered if they could use the same principles to hide an object from the destructive waves produced during an earthquake.

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Russia stunned by missile failure setback

The submarine-launched Bulava intercontinental missile has now reportedly failed on more than half of its 11 test-firings and the latest launch was particularly disastrous as it blew up before completing the first stage.

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MOPping Up: The USA’s 30,000 Pound Bomb

US Defense Threat Reduction Agency has stepped out of its usual verification and WMD detection/ destruction programs to fund a project called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). This 30,000 pound weapon is approximately 31.5 inches in diameter and 20.5 feet long, with about the same amount of explosives inside as Wallis’ Tallboy (5,300 pounds). It isn’t the biggest bomb the USA has ever built – the 44,000 pound T12 has that distinction – but it could well become the biggest conventional bomb ever used. Even the famous GBU-43 MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) fuel-air explosive weighs in at only 21,000 pounds.

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Lockheed Martin Sabre Warrior UCAV Concept

Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization

The Lockheed-Microvision deal is part of a US military project named Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization (ULTRA-Vis). It's intended to equip American combat troops not only with see-through video specs but also with a cunning "gesture recognition" interface allowing squad leaders to effectively scribble on the real world - for instance marking a door, and having the same mark show up in their teammates' specs as well.

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Military mega-lasers are too hot to handle

HIGH-ENERGY laser weapons have been hailed as the future of anti-missile defence, but they may be further from being battle-ready than military chiefs hoped.

In recent tests, several prototypes have suffered serious damage to their optics at intensities well below the expected levels of tolerance. "Optical damage has been quietly alarming upper management in most major programmes," Sean Ross of the US Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico told a meeting of the Directed Energy Professional Society in Newton, Massachusetts, last week. There are also big problems managing the waste heat generated by high-intensity beams.

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Solar Sentry Prepared for Launch

NASA is preparing to launch an orbital observatory that can pick apart the inner workings of the sun. The project is an attempt to improve predictions of space weather events that can impact GPS and other satellite systems, radio transmissions and power grids on Earth.

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New Mirror Reflects from Any Angle

A universal mirror, an object that reflects all light waves back at their source, has been created by scientists in Europe and Asia.

Unlike an ordinary mirror, which only reflects objects at 90 degrees, a universal mirror reflects objects back at any angle. In other words, a person positioned in front of a large, optical universal mirror would see his or her own reflection perfectly no matter where the person stands.

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Lockheed Martin Gets $92.8M for Integrated Submarine Imaging System

Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors in Manassas, VA won a $92.8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for the engineering services and support of the AN/BVY-1 Integrated Submarine Imaging System (ISIS) and for the production of 10 AN/BVY-1(V)1 integrated control and display cabinets.

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Ares 1 Test Flight NASA CGI Video

Soldiers could get hand-held, radar-like device

A hand-held radar device designed to see through walls, ceilings and floors may give soldiers the ability to spot enemy forces inside buildings.

Program Executive Office Soldier is developing a “sense through the wall” technology that will make it harder for individuals inside buildings to hide from soldiers searching for bad guys.

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Reading machine to snoop on Web

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.

DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with.

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New grenade launcher work better at night

The M320 40mm Grenade Launcher Module issued to the 82nd Airborne Division recently may do the trick. Specs for the M320 called for something more reliable, more ergonomic, more accurate, and safer than the so-so M203 launcher troops have been using for more than four decades. Heckler and Koch, who was awarded the contract, delivered a parcel of clever, if heavier, improvements.

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Invisible Flash Takes Night Photos Without the Burst of (Visible) Light

Finally: a flash camera without all the usual problems. By using a flashbulb that emits ultraviolet and infrared light (neither of which the human eye can detect) instead of visible light, New York University's Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus have come up with dark photography that will neither blind your subject nor produce the unwanted glare of a harsh flash in the developed photo.

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No escape system could save astronauts if Ares I rocket exploded during first minute

The crew of NASA's newest spacecraft "will not survive" an explosion of the Ares I rocket within the first minute of launch because blazing chunks of solid-rocket fuel would melt the parachutes on the crew-escape system, according to a new Air Force report.

The report by the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base -- which has safety responsibility for the Cape Canaveral rocket range -- used data from an unmanned Titan IV that was blown up by safety officers when its guidance system malfunctioned soon after leaving the pad at Cape Canaveral in 1998. Like Ares I, the Titan used solid-fuel motors.

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Corsair Launching New 'Extreme' Solid State Drives

Memory maker Corsair has announced additions to its rangeof solid-state hard drives. The new 'Extreme Series' is a collection of three high performance drives which are perfect as primary drives in notebooks and desktop systems and come in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities.

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Boeing shows off sexy new fighter concept

Boeing Phantom Works has revealed a new concept image for an F/A-XX fighter to replace the F/A-18E/F fleet after about 10-15 more years. The two-seat, twin-engine, tailless concept is advertised in the chart below as a "sixth-generation" fighter. The notional -- and evolving -- definition for a sixth-generation includes such technologies as optional manning, combined cycle propulsion, visual stealth, more composite materials and advanced electronic attack capabilities.

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LockMart To Upgrade US Navy Submarine Communication Mast Antenna Systems

Lockheed Martin, in a joint venture with Granite State Manufacturing (GSM), received a $6.9 million contract from the U.S. Navy to design, test and manufacture an upgraded Multifunction Mast Antenna System to improve submarine communications.

Currently, all U.S. Navy submarines operating at periscope depth, including the new Virginia-class attack submarines, use the antenna system as their primary method to communicate with aircraft, surface ships and land-based assets. The system - designated the OE-538 - provides high performance, erectable mast-mounted communication and navigation capabilities.

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Robots ready for a rumble in the outback

Global artificial intelligence companies will battle it out in Australia's outback to be one of the winners of a competition to design next-generation combat robots.

Judges for the Australian-led competition will chose five companies to be given hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to further develop their prototypes next year.

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US sounds alarm on China seapower

The United States voiced concern Wednesday about rising tension between China and Vietnam in the South China Sea as a senator led calls to boost US seapower faced with Beijing's growing military.

Experts at a Senate hearing pointed to a string of incidents -- including standoffs this year between US and Chinese ships -- as evidence of a more assertive sea posture by Beijing.

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Making of Intel Core i7

US Army THAAD system

USAF UAV Predator's "Brains"

Intel Introduces New Processors

Intel introduced four new processors, including a low-power version and a value chipset in Korea market, to usher in mainstream ultra-thin laptops.

Intel ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors enables new sleek consumer laptop designs less than an inch thick, weighing 2 to 5 pounds, and at mainstream price points.

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First Free-Electron Light Source on a Chip

Free-electron lasers are the must-have gadgets for all self-respecting modern laboratories. They work by sending a beam of electrons into an undulating magnetic field, called a wiggler. This changes the trajectory of the electrons, forcing them to emit coherent photons. That's cool, but their real flexibility comes from their tunability. Change the energy of the incident electrons or fiddle with the wiggler, and you can change the wavelength of the laser light they produce.

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Springville company introduces new DVD to protect data for a thousand years or more

Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special. Layers of hard, "persistent" materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company's Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer.

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OLED Breakthrough Yields 75% More Efficient Lights

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently announced a breakthrough in OLED technology that shatters all prior efficiency standards, reducing the ultra-thin lights’ energy consumption by 75%!

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RAF Tornados Lock on Latest Guided Munition

The latest in a series of Paveway guided bombs is ready to see service with the RAF's Tornado fleet following six successful months with the Harrier GR9 on operations in Afghanistan.

Paveway IV went into service in November 2008 and has become the freefall weapon of choice among pilots flying missions from Kandahar. The weapon is to continue its success story with the RAF's Tornado GR4 aircraft which have taken over from the Harrier GR9s in the fight against insurgents:

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Air Force’s ‘Universal Translator’ Has Everybody Talking

The explosive growth in communication technology over the last several decades has resulted in military units that, as often as not, can’t talk to each other. Add civilians, attached to the military, and you’ve got an even more confused comms situation. If you’re a State Department reconstruction team carrying just cell phones and satellite phones, and you get ambushed in southern Afghanistan, you normally won’t be able to talk to the Air Force A-10s flying overhead.

Enter BACN, which “extends communications ranges, bridges between radio frequencies and ‘translates’ among incompatible communications systems,” using Internet Protocols, according to Defense Industry Daily. “That may sound trivial, but on a tactical level, it definitely isn’t,” DID notes.

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Air Force Plans for All-Drone Future

An Air Force study, released without much fanfare on Wednesday, suggests that tomorrow’s dogfighers might not have pilots in the cockpit. The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan. which sketches out possible drone development through the year 2047, comes with plenty of qualifiers. But it envisions a radical future. In an acronym-dense 82 pages, the Air Force explains how ever-larger and more sophisticated flying robots could eventually replace every type of manned aircraft in its inventory — everything from speedy, air-to-air fighters to lumbering bombers and tankers.

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Three atom spintronic device

In today's microelectronics industry, the movement of an electron's charge has been widely exploited to create a plethora of integrated circuits, which has continued to shrink in size and increase in density year after year.

However, anticipating that this trend might not last, engineers are now looking at alternative means from which to create the microelectronic components of the future. One way they might do so is to develop electronic circuitry that uses the intrinsic spin of electrons.

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One-second boot

Santa Clara, California-based MontaVista Software has developed a version of the embedded Linux operating system running on a Freescale processor that can bring an application to life in just one second.

For industrial automation and other similar applications, fast boot-and-response time is critical to successful operation. Applications must be fully operational at power-on and cannot be delayed due to the volatile nature of the platform and environment.

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Monitoring radar

Entrepreneurs at the European Space Agency's (ESA’s) Business Incubation centre in the Netherlands have used radar technology from the Envisat remote-sensing satellite to develop a radar that can monitor land and buildings from small aircraft.

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Navy Wants High-Powered Laser for Fending Off Small Boats

Northrop Grumman came away with the $98-million contract for the Maritime Laser Demonstration (MLD) in early July. Next up: installing a prototype of the laser on a ship and testing it on a remote-controlled small boat within the next 18 months.

This may sound like overkill, but the Navy's excitement over the weapon comes from its "graduated response" capability. The same laser can first identify potentially threatening watercraft, and then use illumination to warn the intruder away from Navy warships. As a last resort, the laser can dial up to high-power mode and strike either the craft's motor or hull.

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Artillery Hunting Radar - ARTHUR

Sukhoi 35 / 37 Video

Sikorsky's Exotic X2

Cyborg insects

Semiconductor Laser that Emits Green Light without using Filters

Sumitomo Electric scientists have developed a semiconductor laser that emits green light without using filters. Sumitomo will be first to market in a race which involved competition from Nichia and Rohm.

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Dow to Test Algae Ethanol

Startup Algenol partners with Dow Chemical on a demonstration ethanol plant.

Florida startup Algenol Biofuels says that it can efficiently produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands--a novel approach that has captured the interest and backing of Dow Chemical, the chemical giant based in Midland, MI.

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How to Make UAVs Fully Autonomous

A smarter vision system could help robotic aircraft detect airborne obstacles.

To become truly autonomous, UAVs will need to get far better at sensing obstacles and reacting in time to avoid a collision. This will be especially important if they are ever to operate in commercial space.

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Raytheon Awarded $30 M for Space Fence System Design and Prototyping

Raytheon Company was awarded one of three $30 million contracts for Phase A system design and prototype of the Space Fence system. Space Fence will provide the U.S. Air Force enhanced space surveillance capability to detect and report space objects.

"Space Fence is the future of space situational awareness," said Pete Franklin, vice president for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems' National & Theater Security Programs. "This sensor will have the capability to detect and track very small objects in low Earth orbit."

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Hurricane forecast

Scientists at Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) have developed a new computer model that they hope will predict with unprecedented accuracy how many hurricanes will occur in a given season.

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New Material Could Cool Electronics 100 Times More Efficiently

Georgia Tech researchers are working on a new novel material for cooling high-powered military radar gear up to 100 times better than current conductive heat-dissipation technology.

Developed in conjunction with Raytheon and DARPA, the material is a composite of copper and diamond, two of the most effective heat-conducting materials. The composite would serve as part of a sandwich of cooling materials called a Thermal Ground Plane, which, combined with a liquid cooling setup, would surround the transmit/receive module in a radar system.

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CMOS digital camera reaches 1.4 million frames per second

Vision Research has unveiled the Phantom v710, the latest addition to the company's v-Series of advanced digital high-speed cameras. The Phantom v710 offers an unrivaled throughput of more than 7 gigapixels/s, which allows the camera to record at 7,530 frames/s at its maximum resolution of 1280 x 800.

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Wealthy arm their yachts with military-level security

The world's richest people are spending millions arming their super-yachts with military-style technology and trained personnel to fight off potential attackers.

The threat of pirates and growing fears that yachts may be their next target have led many owners to equip their vessels with the latest James Bond-like technology.

Hidden chambers, escape pods, tracking devices and ex-marines employed as security guards have all risen in popularity.

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US Military Robot Insect Technology in Progress

Military scientists are currently working on a new type of robot technology - insect cyborgs, affectionately known as 'cybugs'! The vision is to adapt actual insects to become surveillance platforms, equipped with cameras and able to access combat areas impenetrable to humans. Generally speaking, the main difficulty experienced so far in the creation of hugely scaled-down variants of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) like the Reaper and Predator drones currently tasked with surveillance missions over conflict zones like Afghanistan has been that of developing a power mechanism for them that combines low weight with high performance.

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Iron Dome tested successfully

An Israeli interceptor system developed to shoot down the short-range rockets favored by Palestinian and Lebanese guerrillas passed its first live trial on Wednesday, a defense official said.

Iron Dome's success could improve the prospects of Israel eventually ceding West Bank land to the Palestinians, as Israeli officials have said that any withdrawals should be conditional on the deployment of a reliable defense against rocket attacks.

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NASA suits get makeover for moon missions

The new spacesuits being designed for NASA's return to the moon by 2020 as part of the Constellation program are set to be much more sophisticated. As second-generation moon suits, they will be sturdier, easier to move around in, and should be able to recycle resources such as oxygen and water.

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US considers expanding army: Pentagon

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is weighing a possible temporary expansion of the US army to ease the strain from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his press secretary said on Wednesday.
Gates was discussing the idea, backed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, with senior officers to add 30,000 troops to the active-duty army, press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters.

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Martin JetPack

Capable of 30 minutes of flight at around 60 miles per hour, the Martin Jetpack can apparently go as high as 8,000 feet in the air. Naturally, its creator has equipped the device with an integrated ballistic parachute.

Purchase Price: US$ 100,000 plus any applicable sales taxes, plus adjustment for inflation as measured by the consumer price index.

Here

Invisibility Cloak

Laser technology creates new forms of metal and enhances aircraft performance

Dr. Chunlei Guo and his team of researchers for the project discovered a way to transform a shinypiece of metal into one that is pitch black, not by paint, but by using incredibly intense bursts of laser light. The black metal created, absorbs all radiation that shines upon it.

"With the creation of the black metal, an entirely new class of material becomes available to us, which may open up a whole new horizon for various applications," said Guo.

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'Cloak of Illusion' Tech Could Disguise Objects

A cloak of illusion, or a material that disguises one object as another, is being developed by scientists in Hong Kong.

"The metamaterial can turn the appearance of one object into that of another," said CT Chan, a scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and coauthor of a paper that recently appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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IronKey launches USB drive for militaries

California-based IronKey has launched its new Flash drive technology to support military and government markets with tamper-resistant information security.

IronKey has released its S200 Flash drive that is designed with cryptochip and anti-malware technologies to secure sensitive government or military data.

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Taser Tests New Tri-Fire X3 On Their Own Employees

Beyond the very general details of the X3, Taser is still keeping mum with the specifics on how it works, confirming only that the X3 fires equal or less voltage than their current model, the X26, which can unload 50,000 volts at its peak. Taser claims the actual shock delivered to the body is in the range of 400-1,200 volts. The X3 also includes a feature that reports back on whether the shock delivered was "good, partial or no connection."

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Discovery of new optical forces has implications for optical signal processing, telecom

Belgian researchers--at the University of Ghent (Ghent) and the nanoelectronics research center IMEC (Leuven)--have demonstrated repulsive and attractive nanophotonic forces that depend on the spatial distribution of the light used. These fundamental research results could have major consequences for telecommunications and optical signal processing .

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Physicists Find Way To Control Individual Bits In Quantum Computers

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have overcome a hurdle in quantum computer development, having devised a viable way to manipulate a single "bit" in a quantum processor without disturbing the information stored in its neighbors. The approach, which makes novel use of polarized light to create "effective" magnetic fields, could bring the long-sought computers a step closer to reality.

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Internet pioneers warn of VoIP wiretap danger

U.S. government efforts to require most voice-over-IP providers to permit law enforcement agencies to wiretap phone calls could introduce new security problems to the Internet, a group of Internet security experts said today.

A Federal Communications Commission rule requiring providers to allow wiretapping by May 2007 would either require a massive re-engineering of the Internet or introduce broad cybersecurity risks, said authors of a new study released by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), an IT vendor trade group.

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Reaper Eyed As Missile Defense Sensor

The Pentagon could begin to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles suitable to track ballistic missiles early in flight into the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) layered system within two years, says agency director U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly.

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Lockheed Martin to Develop Concept for New U.S. Navy Air and Missile Defense Radar

The U.S. Navy has awarded Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] a $10 million firm-fixed-price contract to perform concept studies for the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), a scalable solid-state radar suite for future surface combatants.

Comprised of an S-Band radar, an X-Band radar and a Radar Suite Controller (RSC), AMDR is intended to significantly enhance a ship’s defensive capability against advanced anti-ship and ballistic missile threats. Lockheed Martin was one of three industry teams to receive AMDR contracts, which will focus on the S-Band radar and RSC during this six-month concept studies phase. The Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., leads the procurement for AMDR.

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First Advanced SatComms Production Terminals Complete Testing

Raytheon and the U.S. Army recently completed successful testing of the first Advanced Extremely High Frequency, or AEHF, satellite communications production terminals.

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Flight test OK'd for new Aegis missiles

An advanced component of the U.S. missile defense system has been cleared for flight testing beginning next year.

The Raytheon Co., which has headquarters in Waltham, Mass., had design work carried out at the company's Missile System facilities in Tucson.

The Standard Missile-3 Block IB program recently completed a critical design review, which will allow for flight tests in 2010 with eventual deployment in Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense systems by the U.S. Department of Defense's Missile Defense Agency, the company said in a release.

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$32.7M to General Atomics for DDG-51 Propulsion System Prototype

General Atomics in San Diego, CA won a $32.7 million not-to-exceed, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for development of a prototype hybrid electric drive (HED) system on DDG-51 Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. Under the contract, General Atomics intends to demonstrate the capability for significant fuel savings by incorporating advanced electric machine technology.

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Electronic Warfare, EA-18G Growler Could Get a Funding Boost

Electronic warfare is a key but often overlooked component in modern warfare. Electronic warfare includes protecting friendly aircraft by finding and disrupting antiaircraft radar; jamming enemy communications to support ground forces; and creating communication links between commanders, other aircraft and troops on the ground.

The Growler is a lightly armed variant of the F-18 fighter jet, configured to hold extra fuel but few weapons.

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SpaceX Successfully Delivers First Payload to Space

The first successful commercial space mission deposits a Malaysian satellite in orbit

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Cymer and ASML ship first EUV source that could extend Moore's law ten more years

Lithography systems manufacturer ASML (Veldhoven, The Netherlands) and lithography light-source manufacturer Cymer (San Diego, CA) announced the shipment of the world's first fully integrated laser-produced plasma (LPP) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography source to ASML. The companies say that EUV will support Moore's Law--the trend toward more powerful, energy-efficient yet affordable chips--for at least another ten years.

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Solid-State Laser Ready For On-Board Tests

A U.S. Navy plan to test a high-power laser against the small-boat threat to its warships provides the first real opportunity to transition electric lasers from the laboratory to the field, says Northrop Grumman, which has won a $98-million contract for the Maritime Laser Demonstration (MLD).

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The Air Force's new poster boys: drone jocks

If the Air Force needed a poster boy for the way it is adapting to the 21st century, it has high hopes that a young officer named Captain Bob will fit the bill.

Bob, who asked that his full name not be used because of the sensitivity of his job, has for now turned in his G-suit to be a desk jockey with a joystick. His days are spent, not pulling Gs, but inside an air-conditioned trailer an hour from the Las Vegas strip.

From here, he flies a remote-controlled airplane over Afghanistan or Iraq to produce video feeds of those wars a world away. The images are fed immediately to troops on the ground to track the enemy, spot someone planting a roadside bomb, or monitor other insurgent activity.

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Mars Experiment Crew 'Returns to Earth'

Six volunteers in matching blue flight suits emerged from behind a steel hatch this afternoon at Moscow's Institute for Biomedical Problems, smiling from ear-to-ear after spending the past 105 days in an "isolation experiment" to try to replicate the conditions a spaceship crew would face on a manned trip to Mars.

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Space station pilots 'interplanetary internet'

Disruption tolerant communications protocol being tested on the international space station.
A new networking technology called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year.

The technology currently is being tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and could lead towards what has been dubbed the "Interplanetary Internet".

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New wonder material, one-atom thick, has scientists abuzz

Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.

That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.

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Superfast airplanes through super tiny technology

Princeton engineers will study how fuel additives made of tiny particles of graphene can help supersonic jets fly faster and make diesel engines cleaner and more efficient. To create the graphene particles, the researchers remove carbon dioxide molecules from graphite oxide (top two molecules) which leaves a irregular bond pattern that creates a buckle in the otherwise flat graphene molecule (bottom molecule). This ridge prevents the graphene molecule from folding into ball.

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