New green and quiet jet-engine test results announced

US jet-engine colossus Pratt & Whitney have announced the test-programme results of their (ahem) revolutionary new PurePower™ Geared Turbofan (GTF) at the Paris Airshow. Unsurprisingly, P&W consider that the GTF will become the new standard in commercial jet engines, significantly greening the aviation industry.

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Dassault Sees Composite Next-Gen Falcons

Although Dassault's Super Mid-Size [SMS] jet still is being designed on the firm's CATIA V workstations, engineers already are brainstorming concepts for a family of aircraft to be introduced in two decades, Bruno Stoufflet, VP scientific strategy, R & D and advance business, said today in Paris. The European Community's $2.2-billion Clean Sky joint technology initiative is a main driver. By 2015, Clean Sky seeks to develop technologies that will reduce carbon and noise emissions by 50 percent and slash nitrous oxide emissions by 80 percent.

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Supersonic travel may return, minus boom

The next generation of passenger air travel at speeds faster than sound may start as soon as 2015, with business jets leading the way, said Peter Coen, principal investigator for NASA's supersonic fundamental aeronautics program.

A small supersonic airliner capable of transporting 75 people might follow in 2025 and a larger one could arrive five years later, he added.

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Revolutionary finding to pave way for smaller, faster and powerful electronics

Electronic devices that will be more efficient and consume less energy than those present today may be just round the corner-all thanks to a breakthrough discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

And the discovery involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have not yet been proven in lab.

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New advance in imaging technology, sCMOS, promises to facilitate scientific applications

Scientific CMOS (sCMOS), an advanced imaging technology, was the subject of a major announcement at this week's Laser World of Photonics (Munich, Germany, June 15-18). The new technology offers a number of useful features that operate simultaneously: extremely low noise, rapid frame rates, wide dynamic range, high quantum efficiency (QE), high resolution, and a large field of view. It represents a cooperative effort among three photonics companies: Andor Technology (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Fairchild Imaging (Milpitas, CA) and PCO (Kelheim, Germany) and has implications for numerous applications including biomedical research, astronomy, and security and defense.

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Photo-Sensitive Threads Turn Clothing Into Cameras

A new fiber optic-laced thread opens the door for large, flexible cameras made of cloth

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Picture perfect

A type of megapixel image sensor developed by scientists at Andor Technology in Northern Ireland, Fairchild Imaging in the US and PCO in Germany made its debut at the Laser Conference and Exhibition in Munich this week.

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Study discovers clues into how eyes search

Like the robots in the "Terminator" movies, our eyes move methodically through a scene when seeking out an object. If we don't immediately find what we're searching for, our attention leaves the already-scanned area behind and moves on to new, unexplored regions of a scene, still seeking the target.

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Boeing Completes Communications and ATM Upgrade for USAF AWACS Fleet

The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] announced today that it has completed satellite communications and air traffic management upgrades on the U.S. Air Force's 32 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) surveillance aircraft as part of the Integrated DAMA/GATM (IDG) program.

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Generating Usable Energy, Just by Driving

A British supermarket chain is harvesting renewable energy from a most unexpected place: the parking lot.

Sainsbury’s, the self-proclaimed eco-conscious superstore that dots the UK, installed “kinetic road plates” in the car park of its latest store in Gloucester. They work a lot like speed bumps, and the store says vehicles passing over them can generate enough power to run the cash registers.

These aren’t run-of-the-mill speed bumps. The plates depress slightly under the weight of the cars, creating a rocking motion that turns a generator without the driver feeling the difference.

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RFID System provides document inventory management

DAILY RFID has launched a RFID document management system for documents inventory management. This RFID document management system includes the needed passive RFID devices to realize documents automatically tracked throughout the file control process.

This RFID document management system, basing on HF, integrates RFID smart labels and handheld RFID reader to allow automated identification of circulating files, thus not only saving the time, enhancing security as well.

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Acoustic laser - SASER

Scientists at Nottingham University, in collaboration with colleagues at the Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in the Ukraine, have produced the saser, a sonic equivalent to the laser.

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Hudson Plane: Out-of-Town Geese Did It

Back on January 15th, US Airways Flight 1549 made that amazing water landing in the Hudson after both engines were taken out by Canada geese, which can weigh eight pounds each. Now scientists have used forensic techniques to clear local geese—the perpetrators were out-of-towners. The study appears June 8th in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

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"Smart" Bridges Harness Technology to Stay Safe

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Michigan Department of Transportation are funding a $19 million project to build next-generation monitoring systems for bridges. "There are quite a few bridges that get a D grade" for maintenance and safety, says Marc Stanley, director of the Advanced Technology Program at NIST, which is promoting sensor-laden "smart bridges."

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Don't Sink My Battleship: 5 Ways to Defend a Supercarrier

Will America’s enemies be able to sink the Navy’s next-generation aircraft carriers? The answer is debatable, but it’s inarguable that potentially hostile nations are developing—and exporting—weapons for the task. And tactics are evolving: Think-tank researchers and military intelligence professionals follow Chinese military journals for the latest theories on stopping U.S. aircraft carriers. The Navy then incorporates new defenses to thwart these emerging threats.

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Magnetochromatic Material Changes Color on Command

In the future, signs will be instantly rewritable and walls will change color at the flip of a switch. A research team at the University of California at Riverside has created a new magnetically activated, instantly and reversibly color-changing material with potentially groundbreaking applications.

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Network of Wi-Fi Enabled Insects Hunts Down WMDs

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have.

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AF ready for F-22 export version

The Air Force is prepared to create a version of the F-22 Raptor that the U.S. could sell to foreign countries if it gets the go-ahead from Congress and the State Department, according to one of the service’s top acquisition officers.

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ORNL finding could help electronics industry enter new phase

Electronic devices of the future could be smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy because of a discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The key to the finding, published in Science, involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have eluded experimental proof. Now, however, ORNL Wigner Fellow Peter Maksymovych and co-authors Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf and Sergei Kalinin at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences believe they may be on a path that will see barriers tumble.

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Colossus, Cray and Blue Gene: The History of Supercomputers

They are the most powerful computers in the world and this is their story from start to finish. Enter the world of computing's heavyweights.

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Move Over, Silicon; Here Come Quantum Bismuth Chips

Newly discovered properties of bismuth telluride hold promise for spintronic quantum computing

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Sukhoi secretive on PAK-FA programmes

Sukhoi is still working on a prototype of its fifth-generation "PAK-FA" advanced tactical frontline fighter, but the schedule for its flight-test programme remains unconfirmed, despite earlier indications that the aircraft would fly in 2009.

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Life's tough, so cameras are getting tougher

Industry heavyweights Canon and Panasonic this year introduced their own rugged, waterproof cameras. Pentax, which has had a line of waterproof cameras for several years, recently added a "freezeproof" feature to its Optio W60, though it's not shockproof.

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Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder Missile Demos Surface-Launch Capabilities

Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) AIM-9X Sidewinder missile demonstrated surface-to-air capability when it engaged an unmanned aircraft vehicle target during a May 16 test.

The AIM-9X is a fifth-generation, high off-boresight, infrared-guided missile developed and deployed for the air-to-air mission. This test marks the second time the AIM-9X was fired in a surface-to-air role.

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A Lightweight Display Brings Instant Army Intelligence to Your Wrist

The flexible, durable, wearable screen could soon be standard issue.

A special-ops soldier carries a slew of gadgets into battle. There's the GPS unit to pinpoint his squad's location, and a laptop for pulling up blueprints of terrorist compounds or infrared readings of buildings scoped out by robotic surveillance drones. With a radio and its five-pound battery, it's too much gear. But in a couple years, troops could lighten their load with a rugged, flexible, wrist-mounted display that's in development by the U.S. Army and HP Labs.

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Unmanned Power Gliders Assume Long Endurance Surveillance Patrols

he French UAV maker Sagem has teamed with German glider producer Stemme AG to introduce the Patroller, a long endurance UAV based on a powered glider. The Stemme S 15 was first presented at the Berlin Air-Show last in 2008. In its current configuration, the Patroller is designed to perform long endurance missions, to be used in a wide spectrum of roles, from military surveillance to homeland security and maritime patrol.

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Raytheon Weighs Continued Funding For MKV

Raytheon is considering whether and how to proceed with work on key technologies that were part of the dying Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) and Kinetic Energy Interceptor efforts, which have been funded by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

The Pentagon proposed terminating MKV and KEI in the fiscal 2010 budget; Congress hasn’t yet approved the plan.

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Beechcraft May Add Weapon-Carrying Capability to King Air

King Air 350 builder Hawker Beechcraft is studying the possibility of fitting out the aircraft with precision-guided weapons as one option to extend the platform's capabilities.

Terry Harnell, the Hawker vice president for special mission aircraft, said the company was looking at designing wing hardpoints capable of carrying small precision weapons, electronic sensor pods or external fuel tanks to make the King Air more versatile.

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Will Future U.S. Military Submarines Be Invisible to Enemy Sonar Detection?: Enter Acoustic Metamaterial Cloaking Tech

It looks like the whole metamaterial/negative-index material movement just got another shot in the arm with development of an “acoustic metamaterial lens” that can theoretically create an acoustic/sonic “invisibility cloak” a.k.a. “cloak of silence” capable of hiding military submarines from enemy detection. DefenseReview first reported on metamaterials a.k.a. negative-index materials or “negative index metamaterials” in August 2006. The technology on which we were reporting at the time theoretically has the potential to lead to an optical invisibility cloak for cloaking soldiers and military equipment and vehicles.

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$20M to BAE Systems for CPX Friend or Foe ID System

BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems in Greenlawn, NY received a $20 million modification to a previously awarded firm-fixed-priced contract (N00019-08-C-0061) for the production and delivery of Mode 5 common transponder system (CPX) identification friend or foe (IFF) hardware and associated platform integration and testing. IFF systems enable forces to recognize friendly aircraft and surface vessels to avoid inadvertent firing on friendly forces. The technology, in use since World War II, has two main components: interrogators, which ask the questions, and transponders, which provide the responses. The Mode 5 IFF system was developed by NATO as an enhancement to older, less capable IFF systems. BAE Systems will perform the work in Greenlawn, NY and expects to complete it in December 2011. The Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, MD manages the contract.

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