• Surge in armored car sales in Brazil

    Brazilians have to live with exceedingly high levels of crime — in the late 1990s, for example, the UN ranked the Jardim Ângela section of São Paulo as the most violent neighborhood in the world — at the same time that government agencies, owing to corruption or incompetence, fail to provide security; São Paulo leads the country — and the world — in making and selling armored cars; tax breaks now allow the middle class to buy protection which once was the reserve of the rich

  • BAE in $61 million contract to service MRAPs

    The U.S. military buys more and more RG33 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to defend U.S. soldiers from IEDs; there is a need to service these lumbering vehicles, and BAE receives a contract to do so

  • More orders for AS&E's cargo screening vans bring in $4.7 million

    Massachusetts-based AS&E’s popular Z Backscatter Vans are becoming more popular; company receives $4.7 million order for the “drive-by” scanning system, following several other orders in the past month

  • Google rents goats for lawn maintenance

    Only in California: A Silicon Valley company has 800 goats it rents out for lawn maintenance and brush and weed control; Google rents 200 of the goats for its expansive Mountain View campus; goats come with a professional herder and a border collie

  • U.S. Navy nears decision on Littoral Combat Ship

    The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will help the U.S. Navy counter growing “asymmetric” threats like coastal mines, quiet diesel submarines, global piracy, and terrorists on small fast attack boats; two teams — one led by General Dynamics, the other by Lockheed Martin — compete for a contract that could be worth more than $30 billion when all is said and done

  • Aussie explosive maker reports healthy returns

    Melbourne-based Orica is the world’s largest industrial explosives maker — and also the world’s largest producer of explosives used in land mines; results for the first half of 2009 shows increase of 15 percent in profit before one-time charges

  • Alion awarded $8.5 million U.S. Air Force contract

    Virginia-based employee-owned specialist awarded a follow-on contract to design and maintain a Web-based system that reports, assesses, and predicts Air Force readiness levels

  • ID scheme looks at gaining access

    Australia’s Centrelink agency has around 26,000 employees and administered more than $70 billion in payments and services to millions of customers annually; the agency has just developed a a more reliable ID authentication solution

  • Lockheed intensifies efforts to sell Turkey missile defense systems

    Turkey lives in a dangerous neighborhood; the accelerated pace of missile development by Iran has not gone unnoticed in Ankara, and Turkey wants to invest $4 billion in buying a missile defense system; Lockheed Martin teams up with Raytheon to win the contract

  • U.K. government in £100 million scheme to promote new ideas, products

    U.K. government launches a new 100 million scheme — the Small Business Research Initiative — to encourage public-sector organizations to invite British companies to submit ideas and develop technologies, which the public-sector organization could then buy to help improve public services

  • Travel ban will not meaningfully slow spread of epidemic

    Computer modelers say that travel restrictions will do more harm (economic damage) than good (slow the spread of the flu); prevention and treatment are better measures

  • DARPA awards Lockheed $399.9 million for blimp

    Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, receives nearly $400 million from the Pentagon to develop a blimp-carrying radar; the radar would be about 6,000 square meters (7,176 square yards) in size

  • Northrop Grumman acquires KillerBee UAV line from Swift

    The KillerBees are blended wing-body UAVs offered in sizes ranging from 6.5 feet to 33.2 feet in wingspan; NG changes name from KillerBee to Bat

  • Dutch flying car company, well, takes off

    Dutch flying car company PAL-V is gearing up for market launch of its flying car; it is Europe’s response to Massachusetts-based Terrafugia’s Transition

  • Current swine flu is the inevitable result of modern farming methods

    The current swine flu outbreak is not yet two weeks old and conspiracy theorists already ascribe it to genetic engineering by clever bioterrorists; the truth is more prosaic: there are more than one billion pigs and more than 70 billion chickens raised every year for human consumption; modern, industrial animal farming methods make the creation of new virus types — what scientists call “reassortment” — inevitable