• DARPA seeks self-aiming, one-shot sniper rifle

    Lockheed Martin awarded $6.9 million to develop a sniper rifle to operate over a range of visibilities, atmospheric turbulence, scintillation, and environmental conditions; the company’s objective is to deliver fifteen field-testable and hardened prototype systems by October 2011

  • Inverted prisms make ray guns practical

    Lasers can be powerful weapons — they can take down an aircraft at long ranges and in unstable conditions, for instance; they are hampered, though, by power and size limits, so they are not yet widely used by the military; Lockheed Martin says it has a solution

  • Raytheon looks to homeland security market for growth

    Raytheon, looking for ways to offset flatter U.S. military demand, has dropped the gold-plating approach once associated with weapons programs in favor of less expensive approaches that save cutting edge equipment for areas where it is truly needed; Raytheon is one of many U.S. defense companies that are betting on foreign sales and growth in adjacent markets like homeland security, an area where analysts expect tens of billions of dollars in new orders in coming years; Brian Seagrave, Raytheon’s vice president for homeland security:”In homeland security, the value proposition is, ‘Good enough, low price’”

  • Cogent, 3M clears legal hurdle

    3M Co. has cleared a major hurdle in its $943 million bid to acquire Pasadena, California-based biometrics firm Cogent, Inc.; a Delaware Chancery Court denied a Cogent shareholder’s motion to block the proposed acquisition of Cogent by 3M, citing the plaintiff’s inability to show reasonable probability of success on the merits of any of the claims

  • Large defense companies acquire pure-play homeland security players

    Daniel Meron of RBC Capital Markets: “In homeland security you are just as strong as your weakest link—- So having the best biometric system, having the best video system, the best motion detection system is not enough; this is not what’s going to cut it”

  • DoD awards contract for pathogen detection

    IntegenX wins a $15 million contract to develop a pathogen detection and identification platform; the company will use a technology developed under a previous DoD contract to purify DNA from pathogen targets contained in complex matrices and present the purified material to an IntegenX library construction module

  • NSA threatened AT&T over buying phone gear from China

    The U.S. National Security Agency, worried about Chineses spying, earlier this year warned AT&T that if the company were to go ahead with its decision to purchase equipment for a next-generation phone system from China’s Huawei Technologies, then AT&T would lose all of its U.S. government business; AT&T has decided to buy the gear from Ericsson AB of Sweden and France’s Alcatel-Lucent SA instead

  • Food delivery services boom as violence force people to stay home

    More than 4,000 jobs have disappeared in the restaurant industry and about 40 percent of dining establishments have closed due to the high levels of crime in the border city; as one industry declines, another emerges: more and more companies are now offering home deliveries of food from different restaurants to Juarez residents who fear going out

  • Daytime shotgun tracer ammunition developed

    Two companies collaborate to produce the world’s first non-pyrotechnic shotgun tracer; ChemiTracer creates a daytime visible trace that travels with the cloud of the shot allowing shooters instantly to determine how to correct their aim

  • USB thumb drive for cybersecurity missions

    New USB thumb drives designed for military, intelligence, and law enforcement cybersecurity missions; the device boots in less than three seconds, then automatically scans and copies data by prioritizing search criteria and securely partitions search results for analysis

  • Nuclear power making a come back

    If Germany, where most of the public is suspicious of nuclear power, plans to extend the life of its nuclear reactors, the world must have entered a new atomic age; indeed: around the world, more than 150 reactors with a total net capacity of almost 170,000 megawatts are planned and more than 340 more are proposed, according to the World Nuclear Association

  • Raytheon engineers show Iron Man suit

    The new robotic suit enables the wearer easily to lift 200lb several hundred times without tiring and repeatedly punch through three inches of wood; yet, the suit, which was developed for the U.S. Army, is also agile and graceful enough to let its wearer kick a football, punch a speed bag, or climb stairs and ramps with ease

  • Taser shotgun in legal trouble in U.K.

    Taser’s new, powerful eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or X12, is being evaluated by the U.K. Home Office for possible adoption by U.K. police; before the evaluation has been completed, the British importer of the weapon sold it to the Northumbria police, in the north of England, which used it against fugitive Raoul Moat, who died as a result; the Home Office has now revoked the importer’s license

  • Northrop wins $2.63 billion DHS HQ IT contract

    In the largest federal construction project in Washington since the Pentagon was built in the early 1940s, Northrop Grumman won a $2.63 billion contract to build the IT and communications infrastructure for the consolidated DHS headquarters, currently under construction on the grounds of the vacated St. Elizabeth hospital in the Anacostia section of southeast Washington, D.C.

  • Space plane that takes off from runway ready in 10 years

    An unpiloted, air-breathing space plane that takes off from an airport runway and carries up to thirty passengers could be ready to fly in ten years; it will cost an estimated $12 billion to develop the space plane, and an additional $10 million per launch, compared to the approximately $150 million cost of a rocket launch; the company predicts that a trip to orbit for two weeks would cost tourists about $500,000 per seat