• Preventing robots from colliding with each other

    With more ands more autonomous vehicles — or robots — on land, sea, and in the air are being employed in more and more military, law enforcement, and first response mission, there is a growing need to make sure that, when on a mission, they do not collide with each other as they go about their business

  • Hand-held detector sniffs out hidden grave sites

    Hidden graves often hold evidence of crimes or atrocities; sniffing dogs are unreliable, and while forensic soil tests are accurate, taking samples from across a wide area and analyzing them just adds to the time it takes to locate a grave; researchers develop a simple hand-held gadget could now let them swiftly scan large areas of ground for signs of a grave

  • Autogyro airborne surveillance vehicle for law enforcement, military unveiled

    The two-seater Scorpion S3 autogyro has been designed for the law enforcement and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) markets; the Scorpion S3 uses an unpowered rotor in autorotation to develop lift, and a gas turbine Alison B17 engine-powered propeller to provide thrust; the design will reduce costs for fleet operators by 75 percent while also reducing their carbon footprint by up to 80 percent compared to a conventional medium-sized gas turbine helicopter

  • Brite-Strike's LED-technology gloves saving officers' lives

    The Massachusetts company’s new product aims to help save officers’ lives: it is a pair of tactical, fingerless gloves that have a translucent, reflective, plastic octagonal stop sign on the palm, into which Brite-Strike puts a high-power LED that flashes with a range of up to a quarter of a mile; on the back of the glove are reflective translucent green strips, with two LEDs

  • Indoor locator device for firefighter, first responders on the horizon

    After several years of research and slow, halting progress, development of an indoor locator device to be worn by firefighters and other emergency response personnel could reach the production stage next year

  • Terrafugia redesigns Transition flying car

    The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed Terrafugia to add 110lb of extra weight to the original design of the Transition —thus allowing for more car-safety features to be added while still allowing the Transition to qualify as a “light sport” aircraft; even with the redesign, though, the Transition is beginning to look more like a single-seat rather than a two-seat aircraft, and there may yet be more weight gains on the horizon as the new design is built

  • New explosives detection technologies show promise

    An adversary who is willing to die trying to carry out a mission is one of the reasons why more conventional security organizations find it so difficult to pursue their protection mission effectively in an asymmetrical war — the kind of war terrorists engage in; new explosive detection technologies may be of help

  • $1.4 million prize for best oil clean-up technology

    X Prize Foundation is offering $1.4 million in prize money for new technologies to clean up oil spills; competitors will be invited to test their technologies in 2011 in a 203- by 20-metre tank owned by the U.S. government’s Minerals Management Service (MMS); a moving bridge that simulates a boat pulling cleanup equipment and a wave generator create ocean-like conditions in the New Jersey-based facility

  • New funding, schedule agreed for nuclear fusion project

    The governing council of ITER, Europe’s fusion reactor project, reached the deal on the financing and timetable for the experimental reactor after a two-day meeting in Cadarache; Europe pledged to provide additional financing of a maximum €6.6 billion ($8.5 billion); the total estimated bill for the EU has doubled to €7.2 billion ($9.2 billion), with the overall cost now reckoned to be around €15 billion; the reactor will become operational in November 2019

  • Detecting sticky bombs

    Sticky bombs — explosives affixed to a car, which explode when you turn the ignition key — as the stuff of movies dealing with the Mafia, but terrorists used them as well (as do the secret services of some countries); researchers at Argonne National Laboratory offer a way to detect surreptitiously placed sticky bombs

  • X Prize to offer millions for Gulf oil cleanup solution

    The X Prize Foundation will tomorrow launch its Oil Cleanup X Challenge promising millions of dollars for winning ways to clean up crude oil from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico; past X Prize categories include mapping genomes, making an incredibly fuel efficient car, and exploring the moon’s surface with a robotic vehicle

  • Snake-like robots dispose of IEDs

    Snakes are flexible, and they can crawl, slither, swim, climb, or shimmy through narrow spaces; the U.S. military wants to emulate these characteristics in snake-like robots that can replace soldiers in dangerous search and rescue missions, surveillance operations, and IED disposal

  • Research shows promise for nuclear fusion test reactors

    Fusion powers the stars and could lead to a limitless supply of clean energy. A fusion power plant would produce ten times more energy than a conventional nuclear fission reactor, and because the deuterium fuel is contained in seawater, a fusion reactor’s fuel supply would be virtually inexhaustible

  • Breakthrough: UCLA engineering devises new location-based cryptography method

    Location-based security is ensured by using quantum mechanics; this type of cryptography could be useful in several settings — for example, one could communicate with a military base with a guarantee that only someone physically present at the base will have access to the information; furthermore, the location-based method eliminates the need for distributing and storing keys, one of the most difficult tasks in cryptography

  • Stealth overcoat hides military equipment

    BAE developed “stealth coating” for military vehicles; the coating makes vehicles and equipment in the field much harder to spot not only visually, but also offers vehicles and equipment protection against detection by radar and thermal imaging devices