• With rising sea levels, the time for adapting is now

    Coastal development has accelerated over the past fifty years; many of the world’s megacities are situated at the coast and new infrastructure worth billions of dollars is being constructed; these developments assume that the stable sea levels of the past several millennia will continue — but this assumption is no longer true

  • 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

  • Initial tests for buried victims rescue device completed

    New victim detection device has been developed as part of a project aiming to enable people to be found quickly from under collapsed buildings or from natural elements like mud or snow; the detection device could literally be a lifeline for victims of future earthquakes, landslides, or terrorist attacks

  • Ocean-landing asteroid will create huge ozone holes

    To date, 818 asteroids that are at least 1-km wide have been discovered on orbits that could take them close to Earth; if a 1-km wide asteroid were to land in the ocean, it would create a big splash, throwing 42 trillion kilograms of water and vapor — enough to fill sixteen million Olympic-sized swimming pools — across an area more than 1,000 kilometers wide and up to hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface; this will result in the destruction of the ozone layer above the Earth’s atmosphere, exposing humans, animals, and plants to civilization-threatening levels of UV radiation

  • Large parts of the world are drying up

    The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa, and South America, have been drying up in the past decade as a result of intensified “evapotranspiration” — the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere

  • USAF develops UAVs that fly themselves

    A U.S. Air Force project will allow UAVs to fly themselves — in multiple-aircraft formations — without colliding; the USAF is working to develop systems that unmanned aircraft can use to sense the presence of other aircraft and take action to prevent collisions that are safe enough so that UAVs can perform any Air Force mission

  • ASIS International 56th meeting opens in Dallas, Texas next week

    ASIS International’s 56th Annual Seminar and Exhibits will open in Dallas, Texas, next week; attendees will be able to choose from 160 seminar sessions and keynote speeches and exhibits featuring security technologies and solutions from approximately 700 companies; they will also have the opportunity to meet with more than 20,000 security professionals from ninety countries

  • Slowing climate warming may require geoengineering

    Scientists warn that to avoid excessive warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather, CO2 in the atmosphere needs to be reduced to 350 parts-per-million (ppm) by the end of this century from the current level of around 390 ppm; one way to reduce atmospheric CO2 by the end of the century is by setting up fields of air-capture devices that absorb CO2, very similar to the carbon capture and storage technology being developed for coal plants

  • Rocket-propelled life preserver saves victims from drowning

    A new rescue device ingeniously buys more time for a rescuer to ready a response and reach a drowning victim; borrowing the design of a rocket-propelled grenade, the new rescue system fires an expanding foam bullet up to 500 feet; once the bullet hits the water, it expands forty-times its original size into a life preserver; because the bullet is made of foam, even if it strikes the victim, it would do as much damage as a tennis ball

  • Portable 3d map-maker developed

    UC Berkeley researchers develop a backpack system containing cameras, lasers, and inertial sensors which can be carried around indoors and generate a detailed, accurate 3D map of the spaces it moves through

  • The world is running out of helium

    It has taken 4.7 billion years for the Earth to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will have exhausted within about a hundred years of the U.S.’s National Helium Reserve having been established in 1925; there is no chemical way of manufacturing helium, and the supplies we have originated in the very slow radioactive alpha decay that occurs in rocks

  • The five fantastic flying machines from the Pentagon

    DARPA has given a Maryland-based company $3 million to develop a flying Humvee; the Pentagon’s restless research arm has an impressive track record when it comes to audacious flying machine ideas — some of which have never made it off the drawing board, while others are still being pursued

  • 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

  • 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

  • India's ambitious thorium-based nuclear energy plans

    With 40 percent of its population not yet connected to the electricity grid and an economy growing by about 8 percent each year, India’s ambitious 3-stage energy security plan includes exploiting the country’s vast reserves of thorium; India could thus find itself a leading global exporter of an alternative nuclear technology that is more efficient than today’s uranium-plutonium fuel cycle