• Face recognition biometrics wedded to cell phones

    Face and iris recognition biometrics are good technologies, but people have to play along: They have to place their faces near the glass, look straight into the camera, make sure the light is just right; the U.S. intelligence community’s researchers want to solve this problem

  • Ocean water rising unevenly; Washington, D.C. may be submerged

    Rather than spreading out evenly across all the oceans, water from melted Antarctic ice sheets will gather around North America and the Indian Ocean;this is bad news for the U.S. East Coast, which could bear the brunt of one of these oceanic bulges

  • Qinetiq to lead effort to reduce friendly fire accidents

    Qinetiq, General Dynamics United Kingdom, and Rockwell Collins have been awarded £3 million by the U.K. Ministry of Defense to develop the Joint Data Network Combat Identification Server Technical Demonstrator

  • World's largest supercomputer will be used for nuclear stockpile research

    IBM to build a 20 petaflops supercomputer, called Sequoia, for the Lawrence Livermore lab; a petaflop stands for a quadrillion floating-point operations per second; to put Sequoia’s computing power in perspective, what it can do in one hour would take all 6.7 billion people on Earth with hand calculators 320 years, if they worked together on the calculation for 24 hours per day, 365 days a year

  • Day of flying cars nears

    MIT alumni are set to produce first commercially flying car (company prefers the designation “roadable plane”); DARPA is already searching for workable ideas for what it calls “Personal Air Vehicle Technology”

  • Doubling the service life of concrete

    NIST researchers double the service life of concrete The key to the idea is a nano-sized additive that slows down penetration of chloride and sulphate ions from road salt, sea water, and soils into the concrete

  • Cybersecurity contractor's network hacked

    A large U.S. government contractor specializing in providing cybersecurity and privacy services, has warned its employees their personal information may have been stolen after hackers planted a virus on its computer network

  • BriefCam launches CCTV video synopsis technology

    Video synopsis technology allows one day of surveillance camera footage to be condensed into a few minutes, thus allowing security personnel to focus on evens that require attention while reducing costs

  • LANL Blackberry lost in a "sensitive foreign country"

    Security problems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory continue; internal e-mail reveal that there was a break-in at the Santa Fe home of a LANL scientist, from which three LANL computers were stolen; also, a LANL Blackberry was lost in a “sensitive foreign country”

  • Reducing casualties from friendly fire

    With all the advances in information gathering and precision, instances of death and injury from friendly fire still occur; U.S. Army awards BAE Systems and Thales a contract to develop a millimeter wave-based identification system

  • Growing interest in flexible display -- for both soldiering and profit

    U.S. Army invests $50 million in flexible displays, bringing its total investment since 2004 to $100 million; flexible displays are paper-thin electronic screens that can be bent, mounted onto objects, and sewn into clothing

  • ASCE assigns Grade of D to U.S. infrastructure

    Civil engineers association assigns a D grade to U.S. infrastructure, and says $2.2 trillion in repairs needed

  • U.S. rocketry competition is under way

    Future rocket scientists: Twenty college teams to meet in Huntsville, Alabama, to compete in rocket design; event is designed to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics

  • Annual space trajectory competition begins

    European Space Agency announces Global Trajectory Optimization Competition; competition seeks to find the best solution to an interplanetary trajectory problem

  • Bomb-proof concrete developed

    Liverpool University researchers develop blast-resistant concrete; the Ultra High Performance Fiber Reinforced Concrete is able to absorb a thousand times more energy than conventional mixtures