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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