• 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

  • General Atomic says its Blitzer rail gun already "tactically relevant"

    Last Friday the U.S. Navy tested a rail gun with muzzle energies of 64 megajoules; the gun aims to deliver a projectile to a target 200 miles away at speeds of up to Mach 7+; not to be outdone, General Atomics has just released information about how, back in September, it tested its own rail gun — dubbed the Blitzer; while the Navy researchers are still preoccupied with the velocity of the projectile and muzzle energy, GA says it is farther along in weaponizing its system, which it describes as already “tactically relevant”

  • Underground security tech to revolutionize border security

    The University of Arizona College of Engineering is testing an invisible border monitoring system that could revolutionize the way the U.S. conducts homeland security; the border-monitoring system, known as Helios, consists of laser pulses transmitted through fiber-optic cables buried in the ground that respond to movements on the surface above; a detector at one or both ends of the cable analyzes these responses; Helios is sensitive enough to detect a dog and can discriminate between people, horses, and trucks

  • U.S. Navy demonstrates 100-mile hypersonic rail gun test shot

    The latest test by the U.S. Navy of a rail gun saw a trial firing which pushed muzzle energy to a blistering 33 megajoules (MJ); the Navy wants to achieve lab trials at 64 MJ, potentially offering 200 mile range with projectiles striking at Mach 5, before trying to build an actual weapon

  • Fully robotic, remotely controlled bomb-disposal hand nears

    Engineers have developed a robotic hand that offers remotely controlled, highly dexterous movements that could lead to a breakthrough in areas such as bomb disposal; the robotic hand can be remotely controlled by a glove worn by an operator connected to a computer; this can then communicate via a wireless connection with the hand offering real time comparable movements

  • New kind of blast-resistant glass -- thinner and tougher -- developed

    Current blast-resistant glass technology — the kind that protects the windows of key federal buildings, the president’s limo, and the Pope-mobile — is thicker than a 300 page novel — so thick it cannot be placed in a regular window frame; DHS-funded research develops thinner, yet tougher, glass; the secret to the design’s success is long glass fibers in the form of a woven cloth soaked with liquid plastic and bonded with adhesive

  • Ray gun runs at full power for six hours

    Laser weapons are potentially very powerful, but until now they had one major drawback: All the earlier versions of the weapon were essentially giant rocket engines that burned chemical fuels and reached impressive powers; some even shot down test missiles; all of them, however, only ran for seconds at a time, and needed special fuels that would have created nightmares for battlefield logistics; a new Northrop Grumman ray gun has now run at full power for more than six hours

  • USAF looking to emulate fruit-flies for killer insect swarm drones

    The U.S. Air Force is studying how fruit flies maneuver within a heavily instrumented “simulation tunnel” in order to develop tiny, potentially lethal insect-sized flying robots; tiny military swarm droids could scatter across towns or cities to locate or spy on persons of interest to the U.S. military; they might even be able to land on the back of someone’s neck and blow his head off using some kind of tiny warhead

  • WikiLeaks reveals relentless Chinese drive for scientific hegemony

    Among the documents released by WikiLeaks are cables from the science office in the U.S. embassy in Beijing; the cables — some based on Chinese informers — reveal an aggressive, government-funded R&D effort by the Chinese government; among the items of interest: gait biometric device which will be placed under floors and sidewalk to identify people, covertly, by the way they walk; efforts to hack quantum cryptography; and a plan to build 70 nuclear-fusion reactors in 10 years

  • New strategy for UAVs: emulate the soaring approach of peregrine falcons

    UAVs could fly for longer using less power if they copied the counter-intuitive flying patterns of peregrine falcons, say researchers; falcons, instead of spiraling in one direction to stay with a single thermal, constantly change the direction of their spirals

  • Color-changing "blast badge" detects exposure to explosive shock waves

    Researchers develop a color-changing patch that could be worn on soldiers’ helmets and uniforms to indicate the strength of exposure to blasts from explosives in the field; blast-induced traumatic brain injury is the “signature wound” of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; with no objective information of relative blast exposure, soldiers with brain injury may not receive appropriate medical care and are at risk of being returned to the battlefield too soon