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.

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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.

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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.

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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%!

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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:

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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.

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Air Force Plans for All-Drone Future

An Air Force study, released without much fanfare on Wednesday, suggests that tomorrow’s dogfighers might not have pilots in the cockpit. The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan. which sketches out possible drone development through the year 2047, comes with plenty of qualifiers. But it envisions a radical future. In an acronym-dense 82 pages, the Air Force explains how ever-larger and more sophisticated flying robots could eventually replace every type of manned aircraft in its inventory — everything from speedy, air-to-air fighters to lumbering bombers and tankers.

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Three atom spintronic device

In today's microelectronics industry, the movement of an electron's charge has been widely exploited to create a plethora of integrated circuits, which has continued to shrink in size and increase in density year after year.

However, anticipating that this trend might not last, engineers are now looking at alternative means from which to create the microelectronic components of the future. One way they might do so is to develop electronic circuitry that uses the intrinsic spin of electrons.

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One-second boot

Santa Clara, California-based MontaVista Software has developed a version of the embedded Linux operating system running on a Freescale processor that can bring an application to life in just one second.

For industrial automation and other similar applications, fast boot-and-response time is critical to successful operation. Applications must be fully operational at power-on and cannot be delayed due to the volatile nature of the platform and environment.

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Monitoring radar

Entrepreneurs at the European Space Agency's (ESA’s) Business Incubation centre in the Netherlands have used radar technology from the Envisat remote-sensing satellite to develop a radar that can monitor land and buildings from small aircraft.

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Navy Wants High-Powered Laser for Fending Off Small Boats

Northrop Grumman came away with the $98-million contract for the Maritime Laser Demonstration (MLD) in early July. Next up: installing a prototype of the laser on a ship and testing it on a remote-controlled small boat within the next 18 months.

This may sound like overkill, but the Navy's excitement over the weapon comes from its "graduated response" capability. The same laser can first identify potentially threatening watercraft, and then use illumination to warn the intruder away from Navy warships. As a last resort, the laser can dial up to high-power mode and strike either the craft's motor or hull.

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Artillery Hunting Radar - ARTHUR

Sukhoi 35 / 37 Video

Sikorsky's Exotic X2

Cyborg insects

Semiconductor Laser that Emits Green Light without using Filters

Sumitomo Electric scientists have developed a semiconductor laser that emits green light without using filters. Sumitomo will be first to market in a race which involved competition from Nichia and Rohm.

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Dow to Test Algae Ethanol

Startup Algenol partners with Dow Chemical on a demonstration ethanol plant.

Florida startup Algenol Biofuels says that it can efficiently produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands--a novel approach that has captured the interest and backing of Dow Chemical, the chemical giant based in Midland, MI.

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How to Make UAVs Fully Autonomous

A smarter vision system could help robotic aircraft detect airborne obstacles.

To become truly autonomous, UAVs will need to get far better at sensing obstacles and reacting in time to avoid a collision. This will be especially important if they are ever to operate in commercial space.

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Raytheon Awarded $30 M for Space Fence System Design and Prototyping

Raytheon Company was awarded one of three $30 million contracts for Phase A system design and prototype of the Space Fence system. Space Fence will provide the U.S. Air Force enhanced space surveillance capability to detect and report space objects.

"Space Fence is the future of space situational awareness," said Pete Franklin, vice president for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems' National & Theater Security Programs. "This sensor will have the capability to detect and track very small objects in low Earth orbit."

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Hurricane forecast

Scientists at Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) have developed a new computer model that they hope will predict with unprecedented accuracy how many hurricanes will occur in a given season.

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New Material Could Cool Electronics 100 Times More Efficiently

Georgia Tech researchers are working on a new novel material for cooling high-powered military radar gear up to 100 times better than current conductive heat-dissipation technology.

Developed in conjunction with Raytheon and DARPA, the material is a composite of copper and diamond, two of the most effective heat-conducting materials. The composite would serve as part of a sandwich of cooling materials called a Thermal Ground Plane, which, combined with a liquid cooling setup, would surround the transmit/receive module in a radar system.

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CMOS digital camera reaches 1.4 million frames per second

Vision Research has unveiled the Phantom v710, the latest addition to the company's v-Series of advanced digital high-speed cameras. The Phantom v710 offers an unrivaled throughput of more than 7 gigapixels/s, which allows the camera to record at 7,530 frames/s at its maximum resolution of 1280 x 800.

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Wealthy arm their yachts with military-level security

The world's richest people are spending millions arming their super-yachts with military-style technology and trained personnel to fight off potential attackers.

The threat of pirates and growing fears that yachts may be their next target have led many owners to equip their vessels with the latest James Bond-like technology.

Hidden chambers, escape pods, tracking devices and ex-marines employed as security guards have all risen in popularity.

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US Military Robot Insect Technology in Progress

Military scientists are currently working on a new type of robot technology - insect cyborgs, affectionately known as 'cybugs'! The vision is to adapt actual insects to become surveillance platforms, equipped with cameras and able to access combat areas impenetrable to humans. Generally speaking, the main difficulty experienced so far in the creation of hugely scaled-down variants of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) like the Reaper and Predator drones currently tasked with surveillance missions over conflict zones like Afghanistan has been that of developing a power mechanism for them that combines low weight with high performance.

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Iron Dome tested successfully

An Israeli interceptor system developed to shoot down the short-range rockets favored by Palestinian and Lebanese guerrillas passed its first live trial on Wednesday, a defense official said.

Iron Dome's success could improve the prospects of Israel eventually ceding West Bank land to the Palestinians, as Israeli officials have said that any withdrawals should be conditional on the deployment of a reliable defense against rocket attacks.

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NASA suits get makeover for moon missions

The new spacesuits being designed for NASA's return to the moon by 2020 as part of the Constellation program are set to be much more sophisticated. As second-generation moon suits, they will be sturdier, easier to move around in, and should be able to recycle resources such as oxygen and water.

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US considers expanding army: Pentagon

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is weighing a possible temporary expansion of the US army to ease the strain from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his press secretary said on Wednesday.
Gates was discussing the idea, backed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, with senior officers to add 30,000 troops to the active-duty army, press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters.

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Martin JetPack

Capable of 30 minutes of flight at around 60 miles per hour, the Martin Jetpack can apparently go as high as 8,000 feet in the air. Naturally, its creator has equipped the device with an integrated ballistic parachute.

Purchase Price: US$ 100,000 plus any applicable sales taxes, plus adjustment for inflation as measured by the consumer price index.

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Invisibility Cloak

Laser technology creates new forms of metal and enhances aircraft performance

Dr. Chunlei Guo and his team of researchers for the project discovered a way to transform a shinypiece of metal into one that is pitch black, not by paint, but by using incredibly intense bursts of laser light. The black metal created, absorbs all radiation that shines upon it.

"With the creation of the black metal, an entirely new class of material becomes available to us, which may open up a whole new horizon for various applications," said Guo.

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