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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Ares 1 Test Flight NASA CGI Video

Soldiers could get hand-held, radar-like device

A hand-held radar device designed to see through walls, ceilings and floors may give soldiers the ability to spot enemy forces inside buildings.

Program Executive Office Soldier is developing a “sense through the wall” technology that will make it harder for individuals inside buildings to hide from soldiers searching for bad guys.

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Reading machine to snoop on Web

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.

DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with.

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New grenade launcher work better at night

The M320 40mm Grenade Launcher Module issued to the 82nd Airborne Division recently may do the trick. Specs for the M320 called for something more reliable, more ergonomic, more accurate, and safer than the so-so M203 launcher troops have been using for more than four decades. Heckler and Koch, who was awarded the contract, delivered a parcel of clever, if heavier, improvements.

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Invisible Flash Takes Night Photos Without the Burst of (Visible) Light

Finally: a flash camera without all the usual problems. By using a flashbulb that emits ultraviolet and infrared light (neither of which the human eye can detect) instead of visible light, New York University's Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus have come up with dark photography that will neither blind your subject nor produce the unwanted glare of a harsh flash in the developed photo.

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No escape system could save astronauts if Ares I rocket exploded during first minute

The crew of NASA's newest spacecraft "will not survive" an explosion of the Ares I rocket within the first minute of launch because blazing chunks of solid-rocket fuel would melt the parachutes on the crew-escape system, according to a new Air Force report.

The report by the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base -- which has safety responsibility for the Cape Canaveral rocket range -- used data from an unmanned Titan IV that was blown up by safety officers when its guidance system malfunctioned soon after leaving the pad at Cape Canaveral in 1998. Like Ares I, the Titan used solid-fuel motors.

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Corsair Launching New 'Extreme' Solid State Drives

Memory maker Corsair has announced additions to its rangeof solid-state hard drives. The new 'Extreme Series' is a collection of three high performance drives which are perfect as primary drives in notebooks and desktop systems and come in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities.

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Boeing shows off sexy new fighter concept

Boeing Phantom Works has revealed a new concept image for an F/A-XX fighter to replace the F/A-18E/F fleet after about 10-15 more years. The two-seat, twin-engine, tailless concept is advertised in the chart below as a "sixth-generation" fighter. The notional -- and evolving -- definition for a sixth-generation includes such technologies as optional manning, combined cycle propulsion, visual stealth, more composite materials and advanced electronic attack capabilities.

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LockMart To Upgrade US Navy Submarine Communication Mast Antenna Systems

Lockheed Martin, in a joint venture with Granite State Manufacturing (GSM), received a $6.9 million contract from the U.S. Navy to design, test and manufacture an upgraded Multifunction Mast Antenna System to improve submarine communications.

Currently, all U.S. Navy submarines operating at periscope depth, including the new Virginia-class attack submarines, use the antenna system as their primary method to communicate with aircraft, surface ships and land-based assets. The system - designated the OE-538 - provides high performance, erectable mast-mounted communication and navigation capabilities.

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Robots ready for a rumble in the outback

Global artificial intelligence companies will battle it out in Australia's outback to be one of the winners of a competition to design next-generation combat robots.

Judges for the Australian-led competition will chose five companies to be given hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to further develop their prototypes next year.

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US sounds alarm on China seapower

The United States voiced concern Wednesday about rising tension between China and Vietnam in the South China Sea as a senator led calls to boost US seapower faced with Beijing's growing military.

Experts at a Senate hearing pointed to a string of incidents -- including standoffs this year between US and Chinese ships -- as evidence of a more assertive sea posture by Beijing.

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Making of Intel Core i7

US Army THAAD system

USAF UAV Predator's "Brains"

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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