Hammers, Water, Lasers Make Deep Drilling Easier

Researchers are developing replacement technologies to reach superheated water for geothermal power or stretch down to previously inaccessible fossil fuel. Here are a few ideas for parts that will be greater than the hole.

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Optical computer research

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is funding the two universities to establish a research programme on the fundamental science of 'nanoplasmonic devices', whose key components include metal structures that guide and direct light. Industry support for the project is being provided by INTEL, Seagate, Ericsson, Oxonica, IMEC and the National Physics Laboratory.

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Quantum Entanglement, Photosynthesis and Better Solar Cells

As nature’s own solar cells, plants convert sunlight into energy via photosynthesis. New details are emerging about how the process is able to exploit the strange behavior of quantum systems, which could lead to entirely novel approaches to capturing usable light from the sun

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MIT engineers create new school of robotic fish

Schools of robotic fish could one day map the ocean floor, detect pollution or inspect and survey submerged boats or oil and gas pipelines, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say.

MIT engineers are showing off the latest generation of so-called robofish 15 years after they built the first one. The latest incarnation is sleeker, more streamlined and capable of mimicking the movements of a real fish.

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Defense secretary touts F-35 as heart of future tactical combat aviation

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited the Lockheed Martin's F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter factory here Aug. 31, assessing progress on what he called "the heart of the future of our tactical combat aviation."

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Ballistic Protection for Aircraft

As the Global War on Terror rages on, the need for airlift capabilities is is rising constantly. Secure air transport of troops and logistic materials is the stategic advantage that counts when it comes to operations which require rapid reactions.

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Airborne Wi-Fi May Soar Despite the Doubters

CONVENTIONAL wisdom says that too few people will pay to use Wi-Fi services when they fly and that the fledgling industry is, therefore, not likely to succeed.

Domestic airlines have been lining up to wire planes for Wi-Fi service. Just a year after it outfitted its first airplane for American Airlines, Aircell has installed its land-based Gogo Wi-Fi service on 526 aircraft for various airlines. Aircell executives told me that installation costs about $100,000 a plane.

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Coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth found

The search for the best observatory site in the world has led to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth — a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot.

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US Army's guided rocket saga takes another twist

The US Army's frustrated, decade-long ambition to buy a guided rocket for its scout helicopters has taken another twist.

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Boeing To Demonstrate Ground Robotics Capabilities At US Army 'Rodeo'

Boeing will demonstrate its ground robotics capabilitiesat the U.S. Army's first Robotics Rodeo, to be held Sept. 1-3 at Fort Hood, Texas. The event is sponsored by the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Fort Hood's III Corps.

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Missile Defense Technology Moves From Testing To Fielding

Boosted by a few strong years of testing successes, much of the United States' missile defense technology that once was questioned is now ready to be fielded.

Most of the new technologies fielded will be to bolster missile defense for deployed troops. Right now, O'Reilly said, forward deployed bases are exposed to missile threats and there is a large gap in U.S. capabilities to protect them.

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Tevatron tightens up the race for the Higgs

WITH the Large Hadron Collider still in the repair shop, the race to find the Higgs boson has become a lot tighter, thanks to the older and less powerful - but working - Tevatron collider near Chicago.

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Platinum nanocatalyst could aid drugmakers

Nanoparticles combining platinum and gold act as superefficient catalysts, but chemists have struggled to create them in an industrially useful form. Rice University chemists have answered the call this week with a polymer-coated version of gold-platinum nanorods, the first catalysts of their kind that can be used in the organic solvents favored by chemical and drug manufacturers.

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Work on DOD semiconductor to continue

Raytheon Co. won a $7 million follow-on contract from the Office of Naval Research to continue work on a project to develop a new semiconductor for the Defense Department. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding the project. This is the second phase of the Compound Semiconductor Materials on Silicon program.

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Gravity, Quantum Objects, and Violations of the Equivalence Principle

Electrons in a conductor seem to behave differently under gravitational and inertial accelerations, threatening to tear down one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

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Army’s new plastic helmet tops Kevlar ACH

The Army intends to start issuing a new combat helmet made of a special plastic capable, for the first time, of stopping penetration by enemy rifle rounds.

Officials from Product Manager Soldier Protective Equipment plan to buy 200,000 Enhanced Combat Helmets that depend on “ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene” instead of ballistic fibers such as Kevlar and Twaron used in the current Army Combat Helmet.

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High-end server chips breaking records

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's bestCore i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

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Sikorsky Begins Whirl Testing Active Rotor System

Sikorsky Aircraft yesterday said it has begun whirl testing a demonstration rotor system with active flaps as part of the company’s “commitment to design, develop, test and ultimately field next-generation technologies that will advance the current state of rotorcraft. Development partners on the project are United Technologies Research Center for the blades and Hamilton Sundstrand Claverham for the flap actuators.

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Raytheon Standard Missile-6 Completes Key Developmental Test

Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) Standard Missile-6 has completed tests which validate the extended-range anti-air warfare missile's airframe and autopilot performance.By performing a series of preprogrammed maneuvers, the SM-6 missile was pushed to the limits of its performance, allowing the U.S. Navy to gather vital simulation validation data.

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World Leaders Thales and Plasan Partner for Next Generation Vehicles Bid

Israeli company Plasan Sasa - the world leader in armour and survivability systems for military vehicles - is partnering with Thales - a global technology leader for the defence market - to develop a new Light Protected Vehicle for the Australian Army and the international market.

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Raytheon's Gallium Nitride Establishes Radar Technology Standard

Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) innovative gallium nitride (GaN) chips have achieved 1,000 hours of reliable operation, positioning this technology as the standard for next generation radar capability.

GaN technology provides increased reliability and efficiency, resulting in lower prime power consumption and relaxed cooling requirements. Thus, GaN T/R modules provide significantly higher long-pulse radio frequency (RF) power than that of standard gallium arsenide (GaAs) T/R modules.

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DARPA Wants Morphing Helicopter Blades

Military lab DARPA has put out a call for rotor blades that could boost payloads by 30 percent and range by 40 percent, as well as reduce sound by 50 percent and vibration by 90 percent compared to the usual fixed rotor blades.

The agency envisions helicopter blades that can morph into different modes for "fuel efficiency" or "high maneuver," as examples. Adaptive technologies could change the diameter, sweep, chord, and tip shape of the blades, as well as other features.

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Aerospace Giant Building a Gravity Tractor to Deflect Killer Asteroids

NASA astronauts Edward Lu and Stanley Love first proposed using a robotic spacecraft to nudge space rocks away from Earth using the gentle force of gravity a few years ago. Now a European aerospace giant has begun seriously investigating the concept.

The 11-ton "gravity tractor" would have to launch 15 years before a predicted collision between an asteroid and Earth, according to the BBC. But the company, EADS Astrium, noted that no spacecraft prototype has emerged just yet.

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Plasmons create smallest laser - again

Earlier this month researchers from Purdue, Cornell and Norfolk State universities reported demonstration of the smallest laser ever --, consisting of a nanoparticle just 44 nm across. Strictly speaking it was a spaser --, or surface plasmon laser. Now it's the turn of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. This week in an article in Nature the Berkeley researchers claim to have created the smallest semiconductor laser ever. Their new device can generate light in a space just 5 nm in size.

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Hyperspectral imaging gets funding boost

Multispectral imaging technology got a big boost recently when the U.S. House of Representatives approved a funding bill that includes $2.5 million for development of hyperspectral imaging by Headwall Photonics (Fitchburg, MA). The funding is included in the FY10 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which the House passed on July 30, 2009. The Senate must still approve its appropriations bill and then both chambers will have to approve a reconciled bill before it goes to the president's desk to be signed into law.

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Graphene Makes Transistors Tunable

The existence of an energy gap between the conduction and valence electron bands of a semiconductor is what makes it possible for the material to act as a semiconductor. In both single-layer and double-layer graphene [left and middle], the valence and conduction bands are in effect conical and meet at a point, with no band gap. The introduction of an electric field perpendicular to the layers [right] creates an asymmetry, which generates a band gap. Though small, the gap is tunable, creating possibilities for new devices.

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Computerized Face-Recognition Technology Is Still Easily Foiled by Cosmetic Surgery

Systematic studies have tested face-recognition algorithms in a variety of challenging situations—bad lighting, for example—”but none of those conditions had nearly the effect of plastic surgery,” says Afzel Noore, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at West Virginia University, in Morgantown.

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Computerized Face-Recognition Technology Is Still Easily Foiled by Cosmetic Surgery

Systematic studies have tested face-recognition algorithms in a variety of challenging situations—bad lighting, for example—”but none of those conditions had nearly the effect of plastic surgery,” says Afzel Noore, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at West Virginia University, in Morgantown.

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NASA, FAA Work Focus On NextGen R&D

While users push for more near-term benefits from the U.S. NextGen airspace modernization effort, a research transition team established by the FAA and NASA is trying to ensure longer-term technologies stay on track to deliver the increases in capacity and efficiency required by 2025.

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U.S. Army Defining Modernization Plan

By early October, the U.S. Army will have a new program executive office (PEO) in charge of its Brigade Combat Team Modernization (BCTM), a sweeping effort to restructure its controversial Future Combat Systems (FCS) program.

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