GD wins second order to integrate US Army “Prophet Enhanced” system into military vehicles

A team led by General Dynamics C4 Systems has received a new, $3 million delivery order from the U.S. Army to integrate the Prophet Enhanced tactical signals intelligence system into Medium Mine Protected Vehicles (MMPV). The order is in support of a Department of Defense requirement that is providing additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to the U.S. military. MMPVs equipped with the Prophet Enhanced system will be delivered to the U.S. Army in October 2009.

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Hitachi Announces Super-Powered Lithium Ion Battery

New Hitachi battery offers 1.7 times more power while being smaller and lighter than previous generations.’

One of the key areas of research for alternative power sources for vehicles is in batteries. As batteries become more powerful, smaller, and lighter, the range of electric and hybrid vehicles will increase making them more viable alternatives for drivers.

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Cute Pocket-Sized Robot Could Change Urban Warfare

Consumer- and military-robot manufacturer iRobot has made a little "cousin" of its famous Packbot that's small enough to fit in a pocket, weighs less than a pound, clambers almost anywhere and forms ad-hoc wireless networks with its kin.

It's been made under a Pentagon contract to develop "LANdroids," small, automatically networking communications and surveillance robots.

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Next-Gen Ultrasound

Micromachined transducer probes for ultrasound scanners should provide prenatal images that are even sharper than those new parents now get to see. The pictures, though, may never be as crisp as the one in this fanciful photo-illustration.

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Engine Defects Threaten Su-30 Fleet

Russian engineers have determined that the April 26th crash of one of the two prototypes of the Russian Su-35 fifth generation fighters, was an "engineering defect" in one of the two AL-41 engines. The engine failed during takeoff.

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Can "Terminators" Actually be our Salvation?

We might be able to design robotic soldiers that could be more ethical than human soldiers.

Asaro concludes that the use of autonomous technologies such as robot soldiers is neither “completely morally acceptable nor completely morally unacceptable” according to the just war theory formulated by Michael Walzer.

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Beaver-tailed robot mimics tree-climbing insects

Here's another offering from Boston Dynamics' zoomorphic line: the RiSE V3, a multi-legged, beaver-tailed robot that can skitter along the ground, shimmy up a pole, and then quietly cling there and stare at you.
The legs are powered by a pair of electric motors and equipped with small surgical needle micro-claws, which allow the unit to dig into and climb up textured, convex, cylindrical structures at a rate of 21 centimeters per second, or just under a half a mile an hour.

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High-Tech Response to Rocket Attacks

The NBS C-RAM is specifically designed to defeat the threat which rocket, artillery and mortar attacks pose to Bundeswehr units deployed in hazardous areas of operation. The Bundeswehr will be the world's first army to possess an effective defence against this kind of asymmetric threat, which is particularly prevalent in Afghanistan.

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EADS DS Supplies New Type of Ground Surveillance Radar

EADS Defence & Security (DS) will equip the German Armed Forces with a new kind of ground surveillance radar (BUR - Bodenuberwachungsradar) for detecting movements on the ground and at low altitudes with a precision unmatched in the world. As the company announced on Tuesday, Defence Electronics (DE), an integrated activity of DS, today handed over the first of two system demonstrators to the German Federal Office of Defence Technology and Procurement (BWB) for evaluation by the Bundeswehr's Technical Centres. The delivery of approximately 80 BUR systems is scheduled to start in 2012. They are intended to close the gap in capabilities of the German Armed Forces in the area of intelligence gathering and reconnaissance. A modified version of this radar destined for civil applications such as surveillance of border regions or industrial facilities is currently under development.

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AdvancedIO® Systems Announces expressXG(TM) Framework for Rapid High-Bandwidth Application Development

AdvancedIO® Systems, the leader in high-bandwidth connectivity solutions optimized for decision-critical applications, today announced the availability of expressXG(TM), an FPGA framework that accelerates customers' ability to tackle challenging system communication problems. The framework gives customers the tools to embed their own applications directly into AdvancedIO's 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) interfaces. The applications quickly benefit from the line-rate performance capability of FPGAs by leveraging AdvancedIO's expertise implementing Ethernet communications for demanding real-time systems.

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Searching for answers, Microsoft set to intro "Kumo" search engine

In the market for yet another way to navigate cyberspace? Just days after physicist Stephan Wolfram took his WolframAlpha "computational knowledge engine" live, word is that Microsoft next week will debut a revamped version of its flagging Live.com search engine, the No. 3 Web navigator behind Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft will take the wraps off of "Kumo"—the codename of its new, improved search engine—at the D: All Things Digital technology conference next week in Carlsbad, Calif., the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Getting your V6 to act like a V8, while saving gas

The history of engine improvements in the U.S. has tended primarily in one direction: raw horsepower. Engines have gotten bigger and more powerful over time—and that's certainly what automakers have used as a key selling point. But U.S. automaker Ford has decided to take turbo-charging and direct fuel injection in another direction: fuel efficiency.

Yesterday, Ford began production of what it's calling the EcoBoost engine: a new gasoline motor that employs turbo-charging, direct fuel injection, variable timing in the valves that control fuel and exhaust flow to make a smaller, lighter six-cylinder engine perform like an eight-cylinder engine*. When these technologies are combined, "you can now significantly downsize the engine," says mechanical engineer Dan Kapp, Ford's director for power train research. "The fuel efficiency comes from a much smaller displacement engine providing equal or, in most cases, superior performance to the engine you're replacing."

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Magnets help ants lead the way

Miniscule magnets found in ant antennae could help to explain why these insects seem to always know where they are going, according to researchers who suspect the magnets are a key component of a sophisticated, nature-made GPS system.

While human global positioning systems rely upon power-consuming receivers that pick up information from clunky, orbiting 3,000-4,000-pound satellites, the probable ant system weighs next to nothing, requires little body energy to operate and is Earth-friendly to the max.

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BAH Wins up to $28M to Support Navy Crypto Systems

Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), in San Diego, CA won a $16.9 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a cost-plus-fixed-fee pricing arrangement to provide engineering, security engineering and technical support services for Navy cryptographic systems and solutions, and key management architectures and information systems. This 5-year contract includes 4 nine-month award terms which, if earned, would bring the cumulative value of this contract to $28 million.

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