Magic ink offers full-colour printing in an instant

Engineers have long experimented with replicating these so-called structural colors in synthetic materials, and now Sunghoon Kwon's team at Seoul National University in South Korea has managed it.

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Lasers keep submarines in touch through the big blue

THE water that hides enemy submarines also makes it hard to contact the friendly ones from the air - unless they surface. Reaching submerged subs has required giant transmitters sending very low-frequency radio waves, which limits data transmission speeds. Now the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is turning to new blue lasers to get the message through.

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Microchip technology performs 1,000 chemical reactions at once

Flasks, beakers and hot plates may soon be a thing of the past in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results — literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.

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Autonomous underwater robot reduces ship fuel consumption

The best way to stop barnacles from colonizing is don't let them settle and colonize on the hull in the first place- advises McElvany. With that in mind, ONR recently conducted tests with a developmental ship hull grooming robot, called the Robotic Hull Bio-inspired Underwater Grooming tool or Hull BUG. The tests showed that this little groomer — similar in concept to a autonomous robotic home vacuum cleaner or lawn mower — has a lot of promise.

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UK firm wins funding for commercial nanotube process

Surrey NanoSystems, a University of Surrey spin-out working on a low-temperature growth process for carbon nanotubes, has secured second round funding of £2.5m

Surrey NanoSystems was established in 2006 as a spin-out from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) to develop intellectual property which supports the fabrication of carbon nanotubes at low temperature.

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Relativistic Navigation Needed for Solar Sails

A decent-size solar sail could accelerate out of the solar system in no time, and this raises new challenges for navigators.

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New Measure of Human Brain Processing Speed

A new way to analyze human reaction times shows that the brain processes data no faster than 60 bits per second.

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Bacteria Desalinate Water, Generate Power

Bacteria can be used to turn dirty salt water into electricity and drinkable water, according to new research from scientists at Penn State University and Tsinghua University.

The research presents a new spin on microbial fuel cells, which have been used in the past to produce electricity or store it as hydrogen or methane gas.

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Spray-on solar cells

Solar cells could soon be produced more cheaply using nanoparticle ‘inks’ that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb electricity-producing sunlight.

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Behind the Scenes With the World's Most Ambitious Rocket Makers

An improbable partnership between an Internet mogul and an engineer could revolutionize the way NASA conducts missions—and, if these iconoclasts are successful, send paying customers into space.

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Smallest Laser Ever May Herald the Future Of Electronic Devices

For decades, electronic devices have been shrinking, in accordance with Moore's Law. Now, as circuits reach the size of single atoms, progress begins to bump up against the physical limitations of matter. Enter the spaser. This new kind of laser produces a beam so small that it could someday form the foundation of circuits made of light, not electrical impulses.

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Active Cloaking Could Counter Radar, Earthquakes, and Tsunamis

Today's stealth fighters, such as theF-22 Raptor, may do pretty well in concealing their radar signature, but mathematicians say that a new active cloaking technique could someday generate electromagnetic fields to hide submarines from sonar, or even protect buildings from earthquakes.

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A Portable Device for Frying Electronics

An enemy missile has no strategic value if its computer is down. A high-power-microwave emitter can disable a missile's electronics on the launchpad, leaving bystanders unharmed -- and now Texas Tech University engineers have a plan to scale down the truck-size tech.

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Powerful, Simple Rocket Fuel Made from Water and Aluminum

A new rocket propellant consisting of aluminum powder and water ice could point toward the future of space exploration.

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Controlling light becomes crystal clear

A simple way to fabricate 3D photonic crystals could find applications in next-generation laser diodes, LEDs and solar cells.

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Quantum Computers - When?

There are theoretical problems in creating practical quantum computing. Having shown readers the one-dimensional ion trap quantum computing experiment I'll be writing later in this series about the next level theoretical challenge, maintaining webs of computable quantum entities in two dimensions. But even as the theoretical problems are mowed down one at a time, the engineering challenges to building practical devices remain awesome and much less tractable than the theoretical problems.

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Cisco wireless LANs at risk of attack, 'skyjacking'

Cisco Systems wireless local area network equipment used by many corporations around the world is at risk of being used in denial-of-service attacks and data theft, according to a company that offers protection for WLANs.

Researchers at AirMagnet, which makes intrusion-detection systems for WLANs, discovered the vulnerability, which affects all lightweight Cisco wireless access points, as well as the exploit that could be used against networks that have the Over-the-Air-Provisioning (OTAP) feature turned on.

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Biometrics Data Is Vulnerable, Warn Experts

Privacy advocates are growing concerned about biometric "function creep": A company that scans your iris for an ID badge, they say, might also allow government or commercial entities to run this biometric data against their own databases—whether for legitimate or questionable purposes—without your consent. This is why encryption of biometric data is needed, argue Canadian and European biometric experts.

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Lockheed completes mid-air refuelling test on F-35B

Lockheed Martin completed on 14 August the first mid-air refuelling between an F-35B short-takeoff and vertical landing variant and a US Marine Corps KC-130R tanker. The flight test was a critical step as Lockheed continues preparing the first two STOVL prototypes for the first vertical landing test in the fourth quarter.

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Boeing Unveils Mobile GBI

Boeing officials are unveiling a mobile Ground-Based Interceptor design as an option while the White House mulls the future of deploying an additional set of defenses designed to protect the United States and Europe from the threat of an Iranian long-range ballistic missile.

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Land-Based SM-3 Seen as Frontrunner

The likelihood of the U.S. establishing a fixed Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile interceptor site in Poland appears to be waning as the Pentagon is more sharply focused on the quick fielding of a land-based SM-3 system to protect Europe from an Iranian ballistic missile threat.

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Osprey's Record Stirs Controversy

Approaching two years in Iraq and about to deploy to Afghanistan, the V-22's short-lived engines, poor capability rates and high expense have stirred a new waved of criticism.

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Task Force Puts U.S. Airship Program on Fast Track

The U.S. Defense Department's ISR Task Force will huddle early next month with industry officials about forming a consortium to speed development of high-flying, long-duration unmanned airships to gather battlefield intelligence.

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Russia’s Changing Aircraft Industry: Models and Futures

Russia’s aircraft industry remains one of the country’s defense export standbys, and Russian companies are beginning to partner with foreign firms in ways that could increase their reach. In December 2005, Moscow Defense Brief took a look at key trends, especially the consolidation trends as private maneuverings and state ‘encouragement’ to join a “Unified Aircraft-Building Corporation” (UABC) began to consolidate the various players.

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