• 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

  • 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

  • Obama panel recommends active U.S. backing for clean coal

    A panel appointed by President Obama calls for an active U.S. government role in promoting carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a largely undeveloped technology that aims to prevent carbon emissions blamed for global warming from entering the atmosphere; panel recommends government’s consideration of accepting liability over carbon storage sites for thousands of years to come

  • 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

  • Gulf's future depends on oil-eating bacteria, lingering toxicity

    Many marine bacteria have evolved to consume oil and other hydrocarbons, and now the spill has allowed these bacteria to follow their food beyond their natural habitat near oil seeps at the bottom of the Gulf; microbes may degrade the oil quickly, but their activity could eventually pose risks to the Gulf’s ecosystem, particularly in the deep ocean; scientists also worry about lingering toxicity — this is because oil’s toxic constituents, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can disrupt reproduction of marine organisms and can lower their offsprings’ vitality; this chronic toxicity will be magnified along the Gulf Coast’s beaches, salt marshes, and wetlands, because oil degradation in these sites will proceed at a much slower pace than in oxygen-rich environments

  • 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

  • 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

  • More police departments use predictive analysis to predict where crime will occur

    The Chicago Police Department is teaming with a local university to develop a system that predicts where crime will occur; the policing approach, called predictive analytics, has gained momentum in recent years as law enforcement agencies have recognized that some types of crime follow patterns that can be predicted by software

  • 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

  • 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

  • New college program on food security

    The United States has avoided a major terrorist attack to its food chain, but a small vial of a lethal chemical, such as the nerve toxin ricin, could be introduced anywhere along the chain, injuring thousands directly and, like 9/11, affecting whole industries; Polk State College’s newest program, the Agriculture Business/Technology Institute, will address critical industry issues, including the need for greater security in the food chain

  • Russian researcher: Moscow's heat wave the result of secret U.S. "climate weapon"

    It has been unusually hot in Russia this summer, and a Russian researcher asks whether this heat wave is the result of a secret U.S.“climate weapon”; the author writes that “climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries”

  • Terrafugia redesigns Transition flying car

    The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed Terrafugia to add 110lb of extra weight to the original design of the Transition —thus allowing for more car-safety features to be added while still allowing the Transition to qualify as a “light sport” aircraft; even with the redesign, though, the Transition is beginning to look more like a single-seat rather than a two-seat aircraft, and there may yet be more weight gains on the horizon as the new design is built

  • Oil-eating bacteria responsible for oil plumes, dispersants vanishing

    The plumes of dispersant and oil in the Gulf’s deep waters that were causing anxiety among biologists have gone away; scientists say the reason is oil-eating bacteria; the bacteria in the Gulf’s deeper waters may have reacted so fast thanks in part to being primed by natural oil seeps along the sea floor; given that oil stopped flowing two weeks ago, scientists say it is not surprising that the plumes are now largely gone

  • Largest-ever Gulf dead zone spans from Galveston to Mississippi River

    The dead zone off the Texas coast is larger this year than scientists have ever measured, stretching offshore from the Mississippi River to Galveston Island; fish and shellfish often can swim away from these areas but immobile organisms, such as clams, simply die without access to oxygen