AEDC reaches major milestone with hypersonic engine testing

A 10-year effort to upgrade a high speed, high temperature, blow-down ground test facility at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) culminated in a recent hypersonic Mach 6 test run on a state-of-the-art combined-cycle engine demonstrator.

"This test was significant," said Matthew Bond, test manager of AEDC's Aerodynamic and Propulsion Test Unit (APTU). "The Mach 6 run on June 24 was the first-ever scramjet propulsion test at AEDC.

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'Brain Carpet' Translates Thoughts Into Action

Instead of violently shoving a giant needle into the brain a la "The Matrix," Utah scientists are reading thoughts by carpeting the brain with microelectrodes.

This "modest advance," as the scientists describe it, could enable more precise control of prosthetic limbs or advance research in epilepsy and other diseases of the brain.

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Raytheon Ground Soldier Ensemble Achieves Initial Program Milestones

Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) Ground Soldier Ensemble team completed two major program milestones and is moving to demonstrate networked tactical situational awareness and digital communications capabilities for the dismounted warfighter.

Raytheon's GSE team delivered to the U.S. Army the first open frame hardware on schedule in June, and earlier that month, held its first preliminary design review.

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Aluminum Blasted With X-Ray Laser Reveals New Transparent State of Matter

German researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg decided to roast a piece of aluminum foil with a 10-million-gigawatt X-ray laser. They heated the foil so hot that it became a new matter state: transparent aluminum. It's also believed to be the same state of matter that comprises the core of planets, such as Jupiter.

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DARPA Readies an Ultra-Fast Mini-Sub

The DARPA program, first announced in 2006, has finally reached the testing phase. Electric Boat, the company contracted to design the Underwater Express, is producing a quarter-scale model of the speedy sub, to be tested next year off the coast of Rhode Island.

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Blazepoint launches new Tactical Tablet PC

launched a new Tactical Tablet PC for military and commercial applications.
The new range of the ndura RUGGED® Tactical Tablet PC’s incorporate the Intel® Atom™ processor.

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A Quest for Batteries to Alter the Energy Equation

In a gleaming white factory here, Bob Peters was gently feeding sheets of chemical-coated foil one afternoon recently into a whirring machine that cut them into precise rectangles. It was an early step in building a new kind of battery, one smaller than a cereal box but with almost as much energy as the kind in a conventional automobile.

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Arrow 2 test failure a 'serious setback

The failure of an upgraded Arrow 2 missile interceptor in a test off the Californian coast was seen as a serious setback for Israel's main defense system at a time when Iran is accelerating its long-range ballistic missile program.

The Arrow test scheduled for July 22 was aborted on three occasions because of technical malfunctions, including communications glitches between the missile and its Israel-developed Green Pine radar, according to Israel and U.S. accounts.

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Nasa explains its Mars voyage strategies

Nasa has detailed how a hypothetical manned mission to Mars would work. But while that’s a dream, the agency is funding attempts to use private firms to cut the costs of space travel.

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Researchers develop 'brain-reading' methods

It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person's awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person's mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

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US Firm Shown Television Running on Wireless Powe

US firm Witricity developed a system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires. He showed off a commercially available television using the system. This system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

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Barcode replacement shown off

A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

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DOD Completes Large-Scale Tests of Mesh-Networking Tags

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) recently completed large-scale tests of mesh-network location-tracking asset tags from ARINC and Impeva Labs. The tests involved hundreds of battery-powered asset tags that formed secure local mesh networks spanning up to half a mile in length.

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Military spends $155M for the nucleus of future wireless networks

The central component to the military’s bulletproof IP wireless network strategy is now in place. Raytheon this week was awarded $24.4 million of what could end up being a $155 million contract to develop the key technology, known as MAINGATE, that will link disparate military wireless networks.

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U.S. company hopes to make fuel from sunlight, CO2

U.S. start-up Joule Biotechnologies hopes to make commercial amounts of motor fuel by feeding engineered organisms high concentrations of carbon dioxide and sunlight, its top executive said.

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Western Digital Rolls Out First 1TB Laptop HHD

It certainly didn't take long for somebody to roar past Toshiba's short-lived record of 500GB for the largest available laptop storage capacity, announced on May 14.

Western Digital on July 27 introduced two new laptop drives that knocked Toshiba's Portege R600-ST4203 solid-state laptop out of the No. 1 spot: the WD Scorpio Blue drives, available in both 750GB and 1TB capacities.

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New B-2 Radar Meets Mission Requirements

Northrop Grumman Corporation and the U.S. Air Force have successfully demonstrated that the new radar developed for the B-2 stealth bomber can fulfill the performance requirements for its required missions, both conventional and strategic.

Northrop Grumman is the Air Force's prime contractor for the B-2, the flagship of the nation's long range strike arsenal. The bomber is the nation's largest payload, longest range stealth bomber.

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Piezo power on the battlefield

Soldiers could one day power electronic devices such as personal radios using just their own movements on the battlefield.The technology is being developed through a two-year government-sponsored programme that aims to create kinetic-energy harvesting systems that can be worn by army personnel.

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How robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare

Barely an hour's drive from the casinos of Las Vegas, a group of unassuming buildings have become as important as the trenches were to WWI. The big difference? Today's warriors are fighting without getting in harm's way, using drones to attack targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There are now more than 7,000 UAVs ranging from the workhorse, the Predator, and its beefier, deadlier kin the Reaper, to army drones like the tiny hand-launched Raven and the larger Shadow.

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Is the ocean Florida's untapped energy source?

The answer to easing the energy crunch in one of the nation's most populous states could lie underwater.

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University are in the early stages of turning that idea into reality in the powerful Gulf Stream off the state's eastern shore.

"If you can take an engine and put it on the back of a boat or propel a ship through water, why not take a look at the strength of the Gulf Stream and determine if that can actually turn a device and create energy?

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Boyd Bushman Part 3

Boyd Bushman Part 2

Boyd Bushman Part 1

Boyd Bushman on Anti Gravity

Future Weapons: Mercury Round

Active Denial Microwave Weapons

Scramjets promise space travel for all

Advanced technology is also breathing fresh life into winged spacecraft. The buzz centres on a hypersonic engine known asa supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet. Despite the name, scramjets are very different to the turbojet engines that power commercial aircraft, not least because scramjet-powered vehicles must first be accelerated to Mach 4 or so using jet engines or rockets before their scramjets can work. This is because, unlike turbojets, scramjets do not use spinning blades to compress the air entering the engine. Instead, the high speed of the vehicle compresses the incoming air, which is then fed into a combustion chamber where the burning fuel creates an exhaust jetthat exits the engine faster than the air that entered.

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Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky

THE Pentagon's enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversialActive Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee.

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Electricity From Salty Water

A device that gleans usable energy from the mixing of salty and fresh waters has been developed by University of Milan-Bicocca physicist Doriano Brogioli. If scaled up, the technology could potentially power coastal homes, though some scientists caution that such an idea might not be realistic.

Extracting clean, fresh water from salty water requires energy. The reverse processmixing fresh water and salty waterreleases energy. Physicists began exploring the idea of extracting energy from mixing fresh and salty waters, a process known as salination, in the 1970s. They found that the energy released by the worlds freshwater rivers as they flowed into salty oceans was comparable to "each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high," according to a 1974 research paper in the journal Science. But those who have chased the salination dream have collided with technological barriers.

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First Flapping, Two-Winged Aircraft Takes Flight

The world's first successful flight of a self-powered, rudderless, flapping aircraft has been achieved by engineers from AeroVironment.

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