Super-Capacitor Wireless Charging Coming Soon

Research firm Strategy Analytics will be combining the two technologies wireless charging and super-capacitors to recharge any gadgets in a flash.

The Strategy Analytics predicts that wireless charging will quadruple its potential if combined with speed-charging, they could revolutionise the way we recharge our portable gadgets.

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The Pentagon War On Twitter

The U.S. Marine Corps is the latest American military service to change their policy on troop use of the Internet. The marines have now banned the use of Twitter and Facebook while on duty, using NIPRNET (the separate Department of Defense Internet, which also has access to the general Internet).

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Iron-based superconductors

For 22 years ceramic oxides of copper seemed to offer the only way to reach high-temperature superconductivity. Now, a new and unexpected route is being charted: through semimetal compounds of iron.

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Cloud computing hype clouds the picture

The hype surrounding cloud computing is seemingly more hype than substance at this stage, with potential adopters holding off because of confusion about its potential benefits.

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Two terabyte desktop drive arrives from Hitachi

Hitachi has pushed the envelope by shipping what it claims is the world's first 2T 7200rpm drive.Apart from capacity, the Deskstar 7K2000 provides "ultra-quiet operation", low power consumption and high performance.Hitachi has also revamped its mainstream hard drive family. The Deskstar 7K1000.C range will be available in capacities ranging from 160G to 1T.

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Plastic surgery is about to get a makeove

Professor Shinji Takeoka of the Department of Life Science & Medical Bio-Science at Waseda says that nanosheets have powerful features for tissue binding, such as high adhesiveness, flexibility, and transparency.

Applying nanosheets with poly-L-lactide (PLLA) to the incisions of mouse stomachs, the team found that these centimeter-long biodegradable nanosheets healed the incisions without scarring or tissue adhesion.

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Autonomy Is Next Step in Robotics

Manually controlled robots have established their value on numerous battlefields, mostly in reconnaissance and bomb detection and disposal activities. While that’s unlikely to change in the near-term, robot makers are looking ahead to the next generation of design: autonomous capabilities barely dreamed of a decade ago.

Helen Greiner, cofounder of iRobot Corp., a supplier of robots to the U.S. military, says there has been a “push toward getting not just teleoperated robots [in the field], but to make some functionally autonomous.” Making bots and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) autonomous, she adds, is “one of the biggest requests we’re getting.”

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Alenia eyes 'son of Yak' for USAF light attack fighter

he US-based subsidiary of Finmeccanica has confirmed to Flightglobal that the M-346 is being considered for the company's response to the USAF's request for information, which was issued last week. The M-346 is also Alenia's probable candidate for the USAF's T-38 replacement contract, called T-X.

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Inertial Measurement Unit Gives Excalibur Reliability

Raytheon fired nine Excalibur Ia-1 precision-guided projectiles from a Paladin gun system. The test validates the increased reliability of the projectile's new Atlantic Inertial Systems inertial measurement unit (AIS IMU). Using the new IMU, Raytheon achieved a 100 percent success rate.

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Raytheon Contracted For Future Naval Air And Missile Defense Radar

his radar suite will consist of an S-band radar; X-band radar; and radar suite controller. The system will be scalable to meet the Navy's current and future mission requirements across multiple ship platforms.

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Final Modernization First Stage ICBM Rocket Motor Delivered

Northrop Grumman has delivered the final, first stage solid rocket motor for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) July 23 to the U.S. Air Force under the Propulsion Replacement Program (PRP). The delivery represents a significant milestone in the continuing modernization of the ICBM land-based arsenal.

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Space Fence Program Awards Contracts For Concept Development

Last month's award of three $30-million concept development contracts for the Space Fence program will yield an outcropping of risk reduction activities designed to improve the overall space surveillance network.

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AMDR Competition: The USA’s Next Dual-Band Radar

The US Navy’s Dual-Band Radar that equips its forthcoming 14,500t Zumwalt class “destroyers” and Gerald R. Ford class super-carriers replaces several different radars with a single back-end. Pairing Raytheon’s X-band SPY-3 with Lockheed Martin’s S-band VSR in this way allows fewer radar antennas, faster response time, faster adaptation to new situations, one-step upgrades to the radar suite as a whole, and better utilization of the ship’s power, electronics, and bandwidth.

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Raytheon sells its first 'pain ray,' and the less lethal arms race begins

The military isn’t about to deploy its pain ray to the battlefield. But someone in the commercial sector is about to one. The sale is mentioned ina presentation by Raytheon, who built the microwave weapon for the Defense Department.

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Fail-safe field communications nearly ready

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is close to deploying a program that has been in the works for five years and aims to give troops in the field network communications that won’t fail regardless of the operating environment.

DARPA is completing the third and final phase of the Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) program, with every expectation that the technology will quickly become a necessity for military communications.

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New UAV sensors could leave enemy no place to hide

Despite the increase in unmanned airborne surveillance, this rapidly expanding resource is limited when it comes to battlefield focus. It can zero in on just one target at a time, making it tough for unmanned aerial vehicle users when there are numerous, fast-moving targets in the area.

That will start to change in the spring 2010, when the Air Force starts introducing a new sensor that allows a number of different users to simultaneously view an area from 12 separate angles.

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Nissan Unveils Contactless Charging System for EVs

Nissan has announced plans to develop a contactless charging system for its next generation electric vehicle Leaf, which is expected to be out in 2010.

This was demonstrated on the “Hyper Mini,” Nissan’s electric vehicle launched in 2000, with the contactless charging system.

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Flight Test of B-52 with Combat Network Communications Upgrade

Boeing [NYSE: BA] on Aug. 5 delivered to the U.S. Air Force a B-52 Stratofortress upgraded with Combat Network Communications Technology (CONECT), a modification that equips the B-52 with 21st century situational awareness and mission flexibility. The upgraded systems will be tested and verified during flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base.

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First U.S. "Power Tower" Lights Up California

In southern California's Antelope Valley, 24,000 silver-bright mirrors have been positioned to reflect light on two 50-meter-tall towers. And at 11:08 A.M. local time Wednesday, this concentrated light heated steam in those towers to turn a turbine—the first "power towers" in the U.S. to convert the sun's heat into electricity for commercial use.

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Small-Scale Quantum Processor Gets Its Act Together

A new experimental processor combines many of the attributes needed for practical quantum computing, but a full-scale implementation of the powerful technology remains far off on the horizon.

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Gadgets That Let You Walk on Water

Humans can float, swim and dive, but they can't walk on water—our bodies are just too dense. Despite this, a few gimmicky contraptions claim to give men the ability to walk on water (or at least skip across it).

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Researchers produce tunable, small-volume light storage device by stretching optical fiber

Physicists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) say they are the first to produce a single, monolithic microresonator device that combines long storage time, small volume, and tunability to arbitrary optical frequencies. The lack of such a light-storage device has prevented many important light-based applications, they note.

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New Weapon System Boosts Soldiers’ Safety

s U.S. forces fight insurgents in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, officials are working to protect them with new technology, equipment and vehicles.

One of the newest tools in their arsenal is the common remotely operated weapon station II, known as CROWS II, which enables soldiers to acquire and engage targets from the safety of their armored vehicle.

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US Marine Corps Employing Dogs to Detect IEDs

The US Marine Corps is buying dogs that can detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. The USMC Regional Contracting Office National Capitol Region in Quantico, VA awarded an $8.7 million firm-fixed price contract to K2 Solutions in Southern Pines, NC for the purchase of 112 trained and certified IED detector dogs. The contract also covers maintaining a pool of 247 dogs as well as training for the dogs and handlers.

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Plastics that convert light to electricity could have a big impact

A research team headed by David Ginger, a University of Washington associate professor of chemistry, has found a way to make images of tiny bubbles and channels, roughly 10,000 times smaller than a human hair, inside plastic solar cells. These bubbles and channels form within the polymers as they are being created in a baking process, called annealing, that is used to improve the materials' performance.

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Uber-nano nanolasers could lead to faster computers, reliable internet

Researchers at Arizona State University and Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands have been collaborating on a project to make lasers significantly smaller than the ones that are currently available, by finding a way around the traditionally accepted diffraction limit -- the idea that the size of lasers in any one dimension (say, thickness) is limited to half of the wavelength involved.

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Georgia Tech claims 100x copper conductivity for graphene interconnect

Georgia Tech is claiming 100MA/cm2 current densities for graphene interconnect.

Graphene, a single layer of graphite molecules discovered at the University of Manchester, is being touted both for future on-chip interconnect and super-fast semiconductors.

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Riding an Energy Beam to Space

This week at the 45th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit in Denver, researchers, scientists, and engineers will discuss the latest advances in propulsion systems for spacecraft and commercial aircraft.

One topic being examined is beam-energy propulsion--using a beam of energy directed at a spacecraft either to heat up its propellant or to deliver electricity to its engine. By removing the energy source from the rocket itself, beam-energy propulsion has the potential to make launching spacecraft cheaper and more reliable.

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Panel narrows down NASA’s future options

A White House panel tasked with re-evaluating NASA's plans for future space exploration has begun culling a list of potential options — one that ranges from staying the current course to taking direct aim at sending humans to Mars.

The 10-member Review for U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee has trimmed a larger list of 3,000 options down to about seven general scenarios, which it plans to cull even further before presenting them to President Barack Obama later this month.

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Cluster bomb's 'humanitarian' alternative

As with landmines and napalm, cluster munitions are decidedly politically incorrect, and there is a concerted international effort to ban them. Problem is, they're highly effective, and countries that actually fight wars, like the U.S. and Russia, are loath to give them up.

However, a "humanitarian" version of the "cluster bomb" may head-off some objections to their continued production, or at least provide cover for those who want to keep them in the inventory. Billed as safer alternative to cluster munitions, Sensor fuzed weapons (SFW) contain independent self-destruct features based on altitude, time elapsed, and a battery "time-out" that shuts down all functions if no targets are detected within minutes of deployment, according to manufacture Textron Defense Systems.

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