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.

Read More

'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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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%!

Read More

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:

Read More

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.

Read More