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Optical Fiber Edging Laser Weapons Closer to the Battlefield

Silently, the drone aircraft glides above the arid terrain of New Mexico — until it suddenly pivots out of control and plummets to the ground. Then a mortar round rises from its launcher, arcs high and begins to descend towards its target — only to flare and explode in mid-flight. On the desert floor, on

Engineered “Sand” May Help Cool Electronic Devices

Baratunde Cola would like to put sand into your computer. Not beach sand, but silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer to inexpensively provide improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices. The silicon dioxide doesn”t do the cooling itself. Instead, the unique surface properties of the coated nanoscale material conduct the heat

Devices That Convert Heat Into Electricity One Step Closer to Reality

The same researchers who pioneered the use of a quantum mechanical effect to convert heat into electricity have figured out how to make their technique work in a form more suitable to industry. In Nature Communications, engineers from The Ohio State University describe how they used magnetism on a composite of nickel and platinum to

Epidermal Mechano-Acoustic Sensing Electronics for Human-Machine Interfaces

Physiological mechano-acoustic signals, often with frequencies and intensities that are beyond those associated with the audible range, provide information of great clinical utility. Stethoscopes and digital accelerometers in conventional packages can capture some relevant data, but neither is suitable for use in a continuous, wearable mode, and both have shortcomings associated with mechanical transduction of

New Details Emerge on Littoral Combat Ship Breakdowns

In a pair of congressional hearings about the Navy”s embattled littoral combat ship program this month, service program managers and oversight officials fielded tough questions about unexpected increases from ship unit costs — from $220 million to $470 million over the course of the program — and concerns about a planned block buy of upgraded

SmartDeviceLink Consortium Open Source Platform for Integrating Smartphone Apps and In-Vehicle Systems

Ford Motor Company and Toyota Motor Company are forming SmartDeviceLink Consortium, a nonprofit organization working to manage an open source software platform with the goal of giving consumers more choice in how they connect and control their smartphone apps on the road. Mazda Motor Corporation, PSA Group, Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (FHI) and Suzuki Motor

Bell Helicopter Unveils V-247 Vigilant Tiltrotor Unmanned Aircraft

Bell Helicopter is taking its legacy developing tiltrotor technology into the unmanned world with a new aircraft it is calling the V-247 “Vigilant.” The company unveiled a model of the aircraft Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, complete with a motorized demonstration of how the unmanned aircraft system can fold its wings and

Caseless Projectile and Launching System Delivers Jet-Powered Punch

High tech for low casualties. A gun is a powerful tool for putting a hole in a person. That power made them a staple of armies centuries ago and keeps them on the hips of soldiers, law enforcement, and Gadsden-flag-wearing anybodies to this day. Among the problems of such a lethal tool is that, in

NRL Demonstrates Fiber Laser Sensor Technology for Structural Health Monitoring

Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Optical Sciences Division, in collaboration with the laboratory’s Material Science Division, for the first time have demonstrated successful detection of acoustic emission from cracks in riveted lap joints using a distributed feedback fiber laser-acoustic emission sensor. “An automated, in-situ structural health monitoring (SHM) system, capable of monitoring

DARPA Program Aims to Facilitate Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites

Hundreds of military, government and commercial satellites reside today in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth—a perch ideal for providing communications, meteorology and national security services, but one so remote as to preclude inspection and diagnosis of malfunctioning components, much less upgrades or repairs. Even fully functional satellites sometimes

Multi-Mission AUSS – Anti-Submarine Warfare, ISR, Undersea Mine Warfare and More

Thales is unveiling its AUSS concept (Autonomous Underwater & Surface System) long-range hybrid multi-mission multi-sensors remote-controlled system capable of operating both above and below the surface. The new naval system was designed for a broad range of military roles including surface intelligence gathering such as ELINT (Electronic Intelligence), IMINT (Imagery Intelligence ), COMINT (Communications Intelligence)

U.S. Army Testing Aim-Stabilized Weapons

This month the U.S. Army”s Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments (AEWE) program tested the AimLock Stabilized Weapon Platform for the first time during a live fire exercise. This ungainly-looking gun seeks to revolutionize the average infantryman”s combat effectiveness by removing human error from the equation entirely. A civilian development company called Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory (RMSL),