Posts

May 20, 2013

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10:39 PM | Dolphins persuade Navy trainers to dredge up 130-year-old torpedo

The U.S. Navy doesn't yet exactly know how a 130-year-old brass torpedo got to the bottom of the Pacific off the coast of San Diego, but they have a couple of dolphins to thank for rediscovering the rare weapon. The find was so unexpected that the humans didn't believe the dolphi …

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7:00 PM | Another Big Milestone For The X-47B: Its First Touch And Go Landing

X-47B touch and go Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Timothy Walter The Navy's unmanned, autonomous combat jet demonstrator continues to successfully pass milestones for unmanned aviation The Navy's unmanned and autonomous X-47B continues to hit new milestones. Less than a week after completing its first catapult launch from a carrier deck last Tuesday the Unmanned Combat Aerials System (UCAS) executed its first touch and go landings--that's when an aircraft touches down like it's landing […]

May 15, 2013

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8:00 PM | Laser Scanner Can Detect Someone Watching You A Kilometer Away

Torrey Pines Logic Beam 100 Torrey Pines Logic A new device protects soldiers by detecting and locating optical glass. U.S. defense contractors spend a lot of resources developing robots that help the Pentagon's various services keep an eye on their enemies, but San Diego-based Torrey Pines Logic is developing a small robotic sidekick that helps friendly forces know if they are being watched. The Beam 100 Optical Detection System sends out pulses of lasers that can detect various optical […]

May 14, 2013

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9:14 PM | Autonomous X-47B Jet Fighter Makes Historic First Launch From An Aircraft Carrier

The Navy's X-47B Catapults Into the History Books (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman by Alan Radecki As PopSci cheers from the carrier deck ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH, ATLANTIC OCEAN--All that was left on the carrier deck was a cloud of white steam wafting over a flight crew that was visibly bursting with excitement even with faces concealed behind bulky protective headgear, noise suppressing headsets, and darkly tinted goggles. Much of this whooping, backslapping, and […]

May 13, 2013

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6:28 PM | Geophysical Coalition Testing High-Tech Tools To Unearth Hidden Graves

Mass Grave Discovered in Iraq, 2005 James Gordon via Wikimedia Atrocities often lead to unmarked graves. A team of scientists is creating better tools to help find them. Perhaps the saddest byproduct of acts of orchestrated violence isn't the staggeringly high body counts that can accrue, but the bodies that aren't counted. Conflicts like the one that ripped apart the former-Yugoslav states in the 1990s and the ongoing crisis in Syria are generally marked by dually appalling statistical […]

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2:08 PM | Ships With Laser Beams Require New Power Systems

Recently the U.S. Navy announced that it is preparing to deploy a new ship-mounted laser weapon that can disable a hostile boat and even destroy a surveillance drone overhead. This innovation makes the need for reliable, high-voltage shipboard power a matter of national security, officials said at the Electric Ship Technologies Symposium outside Washington, D.C. Read more »

May 12, 2013

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2:48 AM | Mysterious nighttime flyovers near Boston

As they say, when it’s secret, it’s SECRET. Even when it’s all over the news and flying over metropolitan Boston area. Mystery Aircraft Frightens Quincy Residents « CBS Boston. A mystery in Quincy continues to deepen: Who is flying around the city from dusk to dawn, for the past ten days or so? Every night for nearly the last two weeks, residents have spotted a low-flying aircraft doing loops over the city. WBZ has learned the FAA knows what’s going on, but the agency […]

May 09, 2013

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12:00 PM | Race and Gender Discrimination in the Marines.

Although women of color have been hypothesized to experience double jeopardy in the form of chronic exposure to both race-based (RBD) and gender-based discrimination (GBD; Beal, 1970), few empirical investigations that examine both RBD and GBD in multiple comparison groups...

May 08, 2013

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7:00 PM | U.S. Navy Spends $37 Billion On A Ship That Barely Works

Littoral Combat Ship U.S. Navy via wikimedia commons And Navy brass have known about the problems for a year, according to new revelations. The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to anchor the Navy of the future. Instead, a report obtained by Bloomberg News reveals a program plagued by problems, high costs, and an inability to meet even simple docking requirements. Ideally, the Littoral Combat Ship is one vessel that can transform to fulfill one of three roles at a time: anti-mine, […]

May 06, 2013

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7:00 PM | How The World's First 3-D Printed Gun Works

The Liberator 3-D Printed Gun Defense DistributedDefense Distributed creates a fully functional gun, with 3-D printed plastic parts. It started with a crowdfunding project last August. Now, nine months later, the world's first 3-D printed gun is here. Announced via Forbes exclusive on Friday, the design, called the Liberator, is now available for download. Here are what the parts look like: Before making a complete 3-D printed gun, Defense Distributed tested a printed part of an assault […]

May 03, 2013

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12:51 AM | Geography in the News: Guantanamo

By Neal Lineback and Mandy Lineback Gritzner, Geography in the NewsTM and Maps.com Guantanamo’s Troubles The U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was selected by President George W. Bush’s administration to house some of the worst of Osamma bin Laden’s al-Queda terrorists and their Taliban supporters from Afghanistan. It is one of the few…

May 02, 2013

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9:00 PM | Why Your Grocery Store Is Installing Military Cameras

QueVision display in a Kroger via KrogerSurprisingly, it's not about catching petty thieves. The retail giant Kroger is using infrared cameras in 95 percent of its stores, and if all goes as planned, no one will even notice the cameras are there. A system called QueVision, first established in 2010, puts cameras above store entrances and cash registers, runs that data through secret-sauce software, then displays the number of registers currently open and predicts how many will need to be open […]

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6:00 PM | Watch A Super-Dexterous Robot Hand Use Tweezers

A Robotic Hand Grasping A Battery iRobotIt can also pick up batteries and basketballs, use a key to open a door, and operate a drill! Robots, while awesome, tend to be clumsy in unpredictable human environments. Machines that use hands as deftly as humans do, with only minimal direction, would be a tremendous boon to rescue and hazardous work. They'd also be a major step toward useful, multipurpose household robots. Whereas prosthetic hands are designed to restore lost ability while still […]

April 29, 2013

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5:17 PM | Sequester-Hobbled DARPA Takes Aim at New Types of Terrorism

With relevance to homegrown, lone operator terrorist threats highlighted by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a series of initiatives Wednesday aimed at defending the U.S. against increasingly ambiguous threats. Whereas its core mission will remain the same—researching new types of technology for the military—the cutting-edge agency [...]

April 26, 2013

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3:00 PM | Parachuting Canister Detects Chemical Weapons

Global Strike System Sensor U.S. ArmyAn Army research project wants to cover a battlefield with dozens of soda-can-sized sensors to detect invisible threats. Army researchers at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) are developing new technology that could help U.S. troops battle chemical warfare. The technology, a canister about the size of a soda can, can sniff out dangerous chemicals and relay information about potential hazards back to troops. The canister could be especially […]

April 25, 2013

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11:17 AM | Bomb detection device procurement under investigation in Thailand

As we noted in the news piece about McCormick’s fraud conviction, more trouble is on the way as the dominos fall. Stirrings in Thailand. Fraud charges likely in GT 200 procurement | Bangkok Post: news. Fraud charges are likely to be laid against Thai agencies which bought bomb and drug detectors from a discredited British firm, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) says. Member Vichai Vivitasevi says a sub-committee expects to charge suspects as part of its probe into state […]

April 24, 2013

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3:30 PM | New Chemical Trick To Make Fertilizer That Won't Explode

Sandia National Laboratories chemical engineer Vicki Chavez with Kevin Fleming Sandia National LaboratoriesIt turns out another industry's trash is fertilizer's lifesaver. The same chemical that makes fertilizer so useful also makes it really cheap bomb fuel. Researchers at Sandia labs in Albuquerque wondered if they could render the explosive properties of fertilizer inert while still keeping the beneficial properties intact, and this week announced success in a test batch. Even better, […]

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1:22 PM | Department of Energy Invests in Drop-In Biofuel for Military Applications

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced nearly $18 million in four innovative pilot-scale biorefineries in California, Iowa and Washington that will test renewable biofuels as a domestic alternative to power our cars, trucks, and planes that meet military specifications for jet fuel and shipboard diesel. Read more »

April 22, 2013

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5:30 PM | For God's Sake, Stay Inside During A Gun Fight

Bullet impacts on a building in Angola jlrsousa, via Wikimedia CommonsBullets work way differently in real life than they do in movies. Ever wonder why the people taking cell phone videos of gunfights aren't themselves hit by bullets? Turns out, there's no good explanation other than dumb luck, because according to the laws of physics, they should be totally screwed. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon Bombers last week, a bunch of people posted videos online of the firefights, often […]

April 19, 2013

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6:30 PM | How A Pressure Cooker Bomb Works [Infographic]

It's an older recipe than you'd think. "Contents under pressure may explode" has never been more accurate. Pressure cookers heat food with steam, using increased internal atmospheric pressure to heat and trap steam beyond its normal limit of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This same increase in temperature is exploited by a pressure cooker bomb to amplify the power of an explosion set off within. A pressure cooker bomb takes the rapidly-expanding gasses in a typical gunpowder explosion and holds them […]

April 18, 2013

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9:00 PM | Zetas Cartel Is Recruiting Americans

Treasury Department chart of Los Zetas wikimedia commons Los Zetas, an infamous Mexican cartel, is apparently lowering its standards--it's now recruiting Americans. Previously, Zetas recruited largely based on skill, with ex-police and ex-military folk targeted. Now? Turns out that American citizenship has its share of perks, especially for a foreign group trying to operate in the United States, and that counts as skill enough. According to the FBI report released to Public Intelligence, Zetas […]

April 17, 2013

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1:00 PM | DARPA Unveils Teeny Infrared Camera With 5-Micron Pixels

5 Micron Pixel Infrared Camera DARPAThe secret to fighting a war at night? Tiny, tiny, tiny pixels. Human eyesight is such a limiting factor in military missions that DARPA is trying to fix it. Not with lasers; those are reserved for ships, but instead with a new infrared camera using pixels only five microns wide. Smaller pixels mean a high-resolution image can be captured in a tinier package. There are existing miniaturized infrared cameras, but their pixels are about three times the size of […]

April 15, 2013

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1:00 PM | Is The Navy Bringing Back The Autogyro?

It's a drone on a leash. Autogyros are the duck-billed platypuses of the aviation world. They look like helicopters, operate on the same principles as airplanes, and can be pulled like a kite. And if L-3's new Valkyrie drone is any indication, there's a chance autogyros might join the U.S. Navy. First, the principle of the machine: While an autogyro looks most like a helicopter, the rotor is instead unpowered, and provides lift much like the wings of an airplane-by being pulled through the air, […]

April 10, 2013

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9:00 PM | From DARPA, A Navigational Device That Fits On A Penny And Works When GPS Doesn't

TIMU DARPADARPA's new on-the-go navigation chip can measure orientation, acceleration, and time. GPS is great, but it isn't always reliable. The signal can be interrupted by, say, a tunnel, or something else smothering the relay between here and space. So DARPA wants to navigate GPS blackout areas with a chip that does everything you need when GPS stops working, and to make that tech smaller than a penny. The chip is called a timing and inertial measurement unit (TIMU), and it's actually a […]

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6:30 PM | This Full-Size Helicopter Is Actually A Drone

The next big thing in drones? Bigger drones. The new MQ-8C Fire Scout looks so much like a normal helicopter that it took me two days of wandering the 2013 Sea-Air-Space convention floor to even notice it. In fact, the latest evolution of Northrup Grumman's naval drone looks so much like the past of aeronautics that it's easy to miss how it's the future. The mock-up on display had sensors ideal for surveillance, which is what the Fire Scout's smaller predecessor currently does for the U.S. […]

April 09, 2013

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2:30 PM | U.S. Navy To Guard Old Ship With A Freaking Laser

Naval Laser U.S. NavyThe best defense is a good offense, unless you have lasers, in which case the best defense is lasers. One of the U.S. Navy's oldest ships is about to get a lot more futuristic, thanks to a laser. The Navy plans to retrofit the USS Ponce, first commissioned in 1971, with a laser weapons system early next year. The system works by using heat to blast through boats and deflect unmanned drones. The advantages? It's fast, deadly, and incredibly cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it […]

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2:00 PM | The 10 Coolest Machines From The 2013 Sea-Air-Space Expo

Aeros Aeroscraft Kelsey D. AthertonRobots, railguns, and... a Guinness World Record holder? Click here to enter the gallery I got to see a lot of shiny new military technology at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Exposition yesterday. The show--the largest largest maritime expo in the United States--is part trade fair, part science fair, and 100 percent geared toward government buyers. Defense researchers, contractors, suppliers, and companies eager to join their ranks arrived to show off their […]

April 06, 2013

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6:06 AM | Friday Links Round-up (late): Toddlers, teens and in-betweens

I’m going to start a new routine for Fridays in which I round up a bunch of links to various health and science news I didn’t get to blog about. Much of it will be stories from dailyRx that I’ve written, but I’ll list other links as well, including fun ones to discuss with your [...]

April 05, 2013

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11:35 PM | Why Military Homecomings can be Harder Than Goodbyes

This guest article from YourTango was written by Dr Amy James. You’ve seen the pictures of men and women of the military rushing off planes and buses to greet their spouses and children. The smiles, the tears, the hugs and the fanfare warm the heart and cause tears to flood the eyes. But what happens after [...]

April 04, 2013

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8:00 PM | Border Patrol's Newest Tool? VADER On A Drone

Sonora Desert wikimedia commonsCapable of sensing people over a large area, this radar can find and track people hiding in the desert. A military sensor with a movie villain name is helping law enforcement agents nab people trying to enter the United States illegally. The frighteningly named VADER, for "Vehicle And Dismount Exploitation Radar" was first put to use tracking insurgents over a wide area in Afghanistan. With the war winding down, VADER has come home, joined the border patrol, […]