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Elevated super bus to solve Beijing's traffic woes
Beijing and Mexico City vie for the title of the city with the worst traffic jams in the world; Beijing is now looking at an elevated “super bus” as a possible solution; the bus travels on rails and straddles two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to drive under its passenger compartment, which holds up to 1,400 people
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"Smart Potty": medical check ups, automatic seat-lowering
Japanese “intelligent” toilets offer users an array of functions — heated seats, water jets with pressure and temperature controls, hot-air bottom dryers, perfume bursts, ambient background music, and noise-masking audio effects for the easily embarrassed; the latest model also offers instant health check-up every time a user answers the call of nature
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Testing rayguns
Technologies for using laser energy to destroy threats at a distance — these weapons known as directed energy weapons — have been in development for many years; before these weapons can be used in the field, the lasers must be tested and evaluated at test ranges, and the power and energy distribution of the high-energy laser beam must be accurately measured on a target board, with high spatial and temporal resolution
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Tracking algorithms for multiple targets win Australia's prestigious Eureka Prize
A University of Western Australia team — including two borthers who are professors at the school — have won the Eureka Prizes, Australia’s “science Oscars,” for a tracking system that has revolutionized the surveillance and monitoring of potential threats in the vast air, sea, and land space of Australia — and of other countries
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DARPA looking for VTOL UAV to plant covert spy devices
The Pentagon is looking for a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) UAV/UASs - or V-Bat - which will autonomously plant such surveillance devices as remote cameras/bugs, communications relays, marker beacons, small battery powered ground-crawler, or inside-buildings flying robots
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DARPA funds giant space nets to scoop up space trash
One legacy of the space age is the growing amount of debris — defunct satellites, fragments of rockets, and any unused object originally built and launched by humans — accumulating in space; currently there are 2,465 identified objects of more than two kilograms in low Earth orbit, and these objects threaten projects such as the space elevator; a futuristic company proposes collecting the debris with a dozen space vehicles, each equipped with 200 nets, which would scoop up the debris and then either fling them into the South Pacific, send them closer to Earth where they would eventually decay, or recycle the materials
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Small bridge sensors will give early warnings of anomalies, weaknesses
University of Maryland researchers devised a lightweight, low-power, wireless, credit card-sized sensor that will detect weaknesses in bridges and other infrastructure before they can turn into calamities; the sensors would detect anomalies in the structure of even the most inaccessible parts of bridges and send alerts via cellular frequencies to its human masters. Among the things it would measure would be stress loads, vibration, temperature and the creation and growth of cracks
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Scanning for oil from the air
A Scottish firm develops technology to scan for underground oil deposits from the air; the technique called atomic dielectric resonance (ADR), detects and measures onshore oil reservoirs using radio and microwaves, reducing the need to drill test wells
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Smart clothing will power electronic devices
Researchers are set to develop clothing fabric that generates electricity through wearers’ movement and body heat; this technology could be used to power personal devices such as MP3 players or wireless health-monitoring systems; soldiers and first responders could one day power electronic devices such as personal radios using just their own movements on the battlefield or in a disaster area
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3D, interactive X-ray to offer dramatic improvement in security scans
The latest X-ray scanners can glean information about the atomic or molecular weight of a substance, and so help distinguish between materials, but the results are crude; the best they can manage is to show metal objects in one color, organic materials in another, and everything else in a third color; a new technique — called kinetic depth effect X-ray imaging, or KDEX — builds up a 3D image of the object which can be rotated and viewed from a wide range of angles
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Preventing robots from colliding with each other
With more ands more autonomous vehicles — or robots — on land, sea, and in the air are being employed in more and more military, law enforcement, and first response mission, there is a growing need to make sure that, when on a mission, they do not collide with each other as they go about their business
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Hand-held detector sniffs out hidden grave sites
Hidden graves often hold evidence of crimes or atrocities; sniffing dogs are unreliable, and while forensic soil tests are accurate, taking samples from across a wide area and analyzing them just adds to the time it takes to locate a grave; researchers develop a simple hand-held gadget could now let them swiftly scan large areas of ground for signs of a grave
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Autogyro airborne surveillance vehicle for law enforcement, military unveiled
The two-seater Scorpion S3 autogyro has been designed for the law enforcement and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) markets; the Scorpion S3 uses an unpowered rotor in autorotation to develop lift, and a gas turbine Alison B17 engine-powered propeller to provide thrust; the design will reduce costs for fleet operators by 75 percent while also reducing their carbon footprint by up to 80 percent compared to a conventional medium-sized gas turbine helicopter
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Brite-Strike's LED-technology gloves saving officers' lives
The Massachusetts company’s new product aims to help save officers’ lives: it is a pair of tactical, fingerless gloves that have a translucent, reflective, plastic octagonal stop sign on the palm, into which Brite-Strike puts a high-power LED that flashes with a range of up to a quarter of a mile; on the back of the glove are reflective translucent green strips, with two LEDs
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Indoor locator device for firefighter, first responders on the horizon
After several years of research and slow, halting progress, development of an indoor locator device to be worn by firefighters and other emergency response personnel could reach the production stage next year
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More headlines
The long view
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Prototype Self-Service Screening System Unveiled
TSA and DHS S&T unveiled a prototype checkpoint technology, the self-service screening system, at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, NV. The aim is to provide a near self-sufficient passenger screening process while enabling passengers to directly receive on-person alarm information and allow for the passenger self-resolution of those alarms.
Falling Space Debris: How High Is the Risk I'll Get Hit?
An International Space Station battery fell back to Earth and, luckily, splashed down harmlessly in the Atlantic. Should we have worried? Space debris reenters our atmosphere every week.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
Strengthening the Grid’s ‘Backbone’ with Hydropower
Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help add more clean energy to the grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.