• Army's Future Combat System on fast track

    The U.S. Army may be stretched, but it is moving ahead at fast pace on its futuristic Future Combat System; also, the Army’s Brigade Combat Team modularity will be 70 percent complete by the end of 2008 — the largest organizational transformation since the Second World War

  • U.K. UAV competition

    The U.K. Ministry of Defence is holding its Grand Challenge, which calls for the design of a platform with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, monitor, and report a comprehensive range of military threats in an urban environment

  • U.K. says country is a good place for scientific research

    U.K. government body releases a reference work showing major research infrastructures, including light sources, research ships, innovative laboratories, and social data sets

  • Midwest floods to create record dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

    Each year, an influx of nutrients — mainly nitrogen — which come from fertilizers flushed out of the Mississippi basin creates dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — zones where there is not enough oxygen to sustain life; the summer’s Midwest floods flush record levels of nutrients into the Gulf, creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey

  • New way to purify water

    Water-attracting materials seem to repel impurities, thus leaving a layer of pure water near their surface; making tubes from these particle-excluding materials would allow for a new way to purify water — if, for now, in relatively small quantities

  • New, quick method for identifying food-borne diseases

    European researchers have developed a system which prepares samples and performs DNA tests on the salmonella and campylobacter bacteria in a portable and cost-effective chip

  • Better picture of what lies beneath the Earth's surface

    A tool which measures minute changes in the planet’s gravity field from the air allows a cheaper alternative to seismic surveying

  • NASA's UAV helps fight California wild fires

    Fire crews are fighting more than 1,700 blazes that have blackened 829,000 acres of California this fire season; they need all the help they can get — and NASA extends such help by lending the state a modified Predator UAV

  • Evidence of acid rain supports meteorite theory of Tunguska catastrophe

    There are many theories about the source of the mysterious 1908 explosion in Siberia, an explosion which leveled more than 80 million trees over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers; presence of acid rain lends support to one of them

  • New Jersey's Stevens Tech to lead research on port security

    Hoboken is poised to become a center for research into port security

  • BAE adds to its autonomous airship portfolio

    New airship, developed by Lindstrand Technologies, can carry payloads such as high-tech surveillance equipment up to 150 kg in weight to heights of more than 6,500 feet

  • AMEC-led consortium to clean up Sellafield

    Treating and cleaning nuclear waste is part and parcel of nuclear power generation; The U.K. government, a proponent of greater reliance on nuclear power, takes steps to deal with legacy waste problems

  • Powerful laser blinds Moscow partygoers

    Organizers of a rave party north of Moscow use a powerful laser to beam the partygoers, causing retinal burns and permanent eye damage to many; engineers accuse party organizers of “technical illiteracy”

  • Predicting hurricanes

    During the summer and autumn, a large body of warm water with a surface temperature of more than 28 °C appears in the Gulf of Mexico; at certain times the current cannot remove heat fast enough from the gulf, creating conditions that are particularly favorable for intense hurricane formation

  • GAO strongly criticizes DoE over Hanford clean-up

    More than 210 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford in Washington State; most are more than fifty years old; GAO says there now “serious questions about the tanks’ long-term viability”