• Money smuggling across border grows despite increased enforcement

    U.S. and Mexican law enforcement authorities only seize about 1 percent of cash from drug trafficking, despite increased efforts by both countries; stemming the flow of cash is vital to efforts by the United States and Mexico to take down drug cartels, as drug cartels depend on cash from wholesale drug sales to gangs in the United States

  • Unmanned copter to deliver supplies to troops in forward positions

    The U.S. military will award Lockheed Martin a contract to build an unmanned helicopter which will deliver supplies to forward-positioned troops; in trials earlier this year, a prototype has shown that it can shift 3,000lb of cargo across 150 nautical miles in two flights within six hours — all without any input from ground operators other than specifying the destination and route

  • Unmanned helicopter enters restricted airspace after losing communication

    An MQ-8 Fire Scout lost communication with its operators and flew into restricted airspace around Washington, D.C.; typically during a lost communications event, an autonomous vehicle is preprogrammed based on its last waypoint to conduct certain activities, take a holding pattern, and wait for operators to reconnect; the Pentagon says: “We found a software anomaly that allowed aircraft not to follow its preprogrammed flight procedures”

  • Mexico deploys Israeli UAVs in war on drug cartels

    Since December 2006, nearly 30,000 Mexicans have been killed in that country’s increasingly vicious drug war; the relentless flow of guns from the United States into Mexico has significantly strengthened the drug cartels, allowing them not only to withstand the efforts by the Mexican authorities to impose law and order, but in many cases to take the operational initiative, making large swaths of the country ungovernable; the Mexican government, for its part, is bolstering its own capabilities: last year it has secretly purchased surveillance UAVs from Israel to perform monitoring tasks in border areas and near strategic installations in the country

  • Skeletal scans could be newest screening technique

    The adult skeleton has 206 bones; size, shape, density, and joint structure make each skeleton slightly different; throw in an extra lumbar vertebrae or extra rib — which some people have — as well as previously broken bones, implants, screws, and other identifying characteristics, and the signatures become even more individual

  • Railroads do not let HAZMAT teams know what is on train

    Lethal chemicals roll through the backyards of cities and towns without the knowledge of these towns; residents; railroads do not share information about the schedule and contents of HAZMAT cargo with these towns’ emergency services, so the services cannot prepare for catastrophe; if chlorine or ammonia were to escape from a punctured tanker — in an accident or derailment — it would form a toxic cloud; a compromised 90-ton rail car of chlorine could create a plume fifteen miles long by five miles wide; the U.S. railroad industry transported some 75,000 tank cars of toxic inhalants nationwide in 2009

  • Biggest mass graves linked to drug-related violence uncovered in Mexico

    Seventy-two bodies found in a mass grave on a ranch in northern Mexico; in recent months an increasing number of mass graves have been discovered; in June, police recovered fifty-five bodies from an abandoned mine near Taxco, in Guerrerro state

  • Hagerstown PD disappears from analog scanners

    Those wishing to listen in on Hagerstown Police Department calls will have to update their technology: the “patch” to the old 800 MHz frequency, which allowed simulcasting of calls on the old analog frequencies, was taken down last week

  • Testing rayguns

    Technologies for using laser energy to destroy threats at a distance — these weapons known as directed energy weapons — have been in development for many years; before these weapons can be used in the field, the lasers must be tested and evaluated at test ranges, and the power and energy distribution of the high-energy laser beam must be accurately measured on a target board, with high spatial and temporal resolution

  • Tracking algorithms for multiple targets win Australia's prestigious Eureka Prize

    A University of Western Australia team — including two borthers who are professors at the school — have won the Eureka Prizes, Australia’s “science Oscars,” for a tracking system that has revolutionized the surveillance and monitoring of potential threats in the vast air, sea, and land space of Australia — and of other countries

  • DARPA looking for VTOL UAV to plant covert spy devices

    The Pentagon is looking for a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) UAV/UASs - or V-Bat - which will autonomously plant such surveillance devices as remote cameras/bugs, communications relays, marker beacons, small battery powered ground-crawler, or inside-buildings flying robots

  • Rescue 21 bolsters Coast Guard's search-and-rescue capablilities

    Rescue 21 is already covering portions of the U.S. coastline and, as of last week, officially includes the coasts of Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the upper Chesapeake Bay

  • Decline of species at Chernobyl linked to DNA

    Brightly colored birds and birds that have a long distance migration were some of the organisms most likely to be affected by radioactive contaminants; one scientist says: “One explanation may be that these species have, for whatever reason, less capable DNA repair mechanisms”

  • Mexican city is no longer safe for visitors, city's economic secretary says

    The secretary of economic development of the Mexican city of Reynosa says the city can no longer guarantee the safety of its visitors amid recent fighting between the military and drug smuggling groups; the city’s burgeoning medical industry is only working at 25 percent of its capacity; “With this impact (the violence) everything went down to half,” the official said