• iPhone app helps police "see" through walls

    Law enforcement officials are using SafetyNet Mobile, a powerful new iPhone app, to fight crime; the app allows police officers to quickly access all emergency dispatch information including maps, warnings, hazard information, and other critical data; to access the emergency dispatch database, the officer simply points the iPhone or iPad’s camera at a location; this technology allows police to “see” behind doors or walls by alerting them to any potential dangers inside; the app installs on any iPhone or iPad; SafetyNet Mobile has been successfully tested by three police departments in California and is currently being rolled out

  • Beaming rockets into space

    Space launches have evoked the same image for decades: bright orange flames exploding beneath a rocket as it lifts, hovers, and takes off into the sky; an alternative propulsion system proposed by some researchers could change that vision; instead of explosive chemical reactions on-board a rocket, the new concept, called beamed thermal propulsion, involves propelling a rocket by shining laser light or microwaves at it from the ground; with the beam shining on the vehicle continually, it would take eight to ten minutes for a laser to put a craft into orbit, while microwaves would do the trick in three to four minutes

  • New bomb detection tool: Ferns

    Researchers engineered fern proteins to turn airport plants into bomb detectors; the researchers rewrite the fern’s natural signaling process so the plant turns from green to white when chemicals are detected in air or soil

  • "Sniffer technology" may replace detection dogs

    Humans have approximately 5,000,000 sensory “smelling” cells, while certain breeds of dogs, such as the Alsation, can have up to 220,000,000; dogs trained for detection jobs are effective enough, but require much more maintenance than a machine — and researchers have just developed a sniffer machine which may well compete with dogs; the new device uses what is called quantum cascade (QC) lasers to detect any trace vapors of explosive material emitted by a passenger, without the passengers having to remove any article of clothing in the process

  • Camera better than the human eye

    Researchers developed a curvilinear camera, much like the human eye, with the significant feature of a zoom capability, unlike the human eye; the “eyeball camera” has a 3.5x optical zoom, takes sharp images, is inexpensive to make and is only the size of a nickel; the camera will not be appearing at Best Buy any time soon, but the tunable camera — once optimized — should be useful in many applications, including night-vision surveillance, robotic vision, endoscopic imaging, and consumer electronics

  • New glass tops steel in strength, toughness

    Researchers develop glass which is stronger than steel — indeed, the damage-tolerant metallic glass has demonstrated a strength and toughness beyond that of any known material; the new metallic glass is a microalloy featuring palladium, a metal with a high “bulk-to-shear” stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials

  • Food packaging indicates food freshness

    An estimated 8.3 million tons of household food — most of which could have been eaten — is wasted in the United Kingdom each year because retailers and consumers question whether the food is safe to eat; researchers at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University are developing a plastic indicator that alerts consumers to food that is starting to go off; the new indicator will change color to provide a warning when food is about to lose its freshness

  • New technology speeds cleanup of nuclear contaminated sites

    Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on cleanup of some major sites contaminated by radioactivity, primarily from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after the Second World War; Oregon State University researchers have invented a new type of radiation detection and measurement device that will be particularly useful for cleanup of sites with radioactive contamination, making the process faster, more accurate and less expensive

  • New camera technology may give soldiers eyes in the back of their heads

    DARPA is looking for ideas on how to develop a small and light device which will give the user zoom vision, various forms of night sight, and act as a heads-up display besides; perhaps best of all, the proposed kit would also offer “full sphere awareness” — that is, eyes in the back of your head

  • The best place for a wind turbine: 30,000 feet above ground

    At altitude of 2,000 feet (610 meters), wind velocity is two to three times greater than at ground level; since power production goes up with the cube of that wind velocity, this means that at 2,000 feet above ground, wind produces 8 to 27 times the power produced by wind at ground level; if we send turbines farther aloft, into the 150 mph (240 kph) jet stream at 30,000 feet (9,150 meters), than power production grows from 500 watts per meter for ground-based wind turbines to about 20,000, 40,000 watts per square meter; this is very high energy density — and NASA is examining the project’s feasibility

  • Laws of traditional physics would foil Santa's effort to carry out mission

    Santa has 31 hours to visit 378 million Christian children; at the rate of 3.5 children per household, and assuming at least one good child per home, this comes to 108 million homes; if each child receives no more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh would be carrying more than 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself; Santa would thus need at least 360,000 Reindeer to pull the sleigh; since Santa must visit 108 million homes in 31 hours, he will have to travel at 650 miles per second — 3,000 times the speed of sound; at that speed, the lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each and vaporize – indeed, the entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second; Santa himself would be subjected to forces of 17,500 Gs; a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, and be crushed

  • Giving crowds a lift with spiral escalator

    A monorail-inspired design could help create the world’s first continuous spiral escalator; the spiral escalator could transport larger numbers of people than a lift in a vertical space too narrow for a traditional escalator; this could reduce the floor space needed in buildings for personal transporters and cut the cost of putting escalators into underground railway stations

  • BAE develops vehicles for ground war of the future

    A range of technologies could improve the effectiveness and fuel efficiency of current military vehicles, while laying the groundwork for future fighting vehicles; BAE looked at 567 technologies and 244 vehicle concepts, which had to fit only two criteria — the vehicle could weigh no more than 30 tons, and had to carry an equivalent punch to a Challenger 2 tank; the company settled on seven future vehicles

  • Engineers enhance building designs better to withstand earthquakes

    Earthquakes come in all sizes with varying degrees of damage depending on the geographic locations where they occur; even a small one on the Richter scale that strikes in an impoverished nation can be more damaging than a larger one that occurs in a city where all buildings have been designed to a stricter building code; the current building codes are insufficient because buildings designed according to these codes have evolved only to avoid collapse under very large earthquakes

  • Hope for terahertz: laser operates at higher temperatures than thought possible

    Terahertz rays — radiation between microwaves and infrared rays on the electromagnetic spectrum — are a promising means of detecting explosives, but they have proven hard to generate cost effectively. So far, solid-state lasers — the cheap, miniature type of laser found in CD players — have been unable to produce terahertz rays unless they are super-cooled, which makes them impractical for mass deployment; now a group of researchers report a solid-state terahertz laser that operates at nearly twice the temperature that putative proportionality would have predicted