Military tech

A new design for a self-guiding bullet could allow sharpshooters to accurately fire at targets a full mile away.

The bullet, which is still in a prototype phase, is the brainchild of Sandia National Laboratories researchers Red Jones and Brian Kast. It is designed with built-in actuators and tiny fins that should allow it to rapidly adjust its path in flight.

Designed with the military, law enforcement, and recreational shooters as potential customers, the bullet is four inches long and has an optical sensor embedded in its nose for the detection of a laser on its target, Sandia said in … Read more

As machines that let first responders look at dangerous objects become increasingly common, Novatiq has started producing a throwable recon robot with the relatively low price tag of roughly $11,300.

The military-grade Scorp was announced last year with slightly different specs. At 13 inches long and 7.7 pounds, it's compact and light enough for backpack portability.

It's also tough enough to be thrown into buildings and dangerous areas, just like the lighter 110 FirstLook from iRobot.

Both machines are remote-operated, roll on treads, and have flippers that enable them to climb stairs, train tracks, and other … Read more

DARPA's list of projects reads like a sci-fi writer's dream. The federal agency has studied flying cars, starships, and cyborg insects. Now you can add a magic wand flame suppressant to the agenda.

A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency research team at Harvard University created a handheld electrode that puts out fire with no water, chemicals, or smothering.

Details are sketchy as to how exactly the Harvard wand, whose technology may eventually find its way into fire suppression systems for military ships and vehicles, works. We do know, however, that the Instant Fire Suppression program is looking at the feasibility of using electromagnetic fields, ion injection, and acoustics to put out flames. As DARPA so poetically explains, flames are just "cold plasmas comprising mobile electrons and slower positive ions."

There's something very Harry Potter-ish about the flame suppression wand. I almost expected to hear a scientist muttering, "Aguamenti!" during the demonstration video, below.… Read more

The spray seen 'round the world at the UC Davis "Occupy" protest inspired one of the more awesome memes of the year, but just how dangerous is that police-grade pepper spray?

The infographic team at Online Criminal Justice Degree seized on this moment to answer that question. Turns out the nasty orange spray is 1,000 times spicier than the common jalapeno, and more than twice as potent as the consumer pepper spray you might carry around with you.

Click on the excerpt below to see the full image and find out just how safe (or not) the stuff is, as well as what to do if you ever get sprayed yourself (hint: don't rub, and always carry milk and soap to all acts of civil disobedience).… Read more

If you've had one too many flats, take a look at these small airless tires that Bridgestone is showing off at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show.

The Airfree concept tires have resin spokes that radiate from the rim to the tread, curving to the left and right to better support vehicle loads.

They're only 9 inches across, but have been successfully tested on single-seater electric carts in Japan that are often used by elderly people.

While the tire won't suffer punctures, it's also completely recyclable. The spokes are made of thermoplastic resin, which can be reused along with the tread rubber. … Read more

The next time you feel like swatting a bug, consider whether it might be packing military sensors that are gathering data about its surroundings. And maybe you, too.

Researchers at the University of Michigan are working on ways to generate power from insects' kinetic motion and body heat while bugging the bugs as well.

In a paper in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, Khalil Najafi and collaborators created piezoelectric generators that harvest small amounts of electricity from the movements of the green June beetle.

The power could be used to charge a bug-board battery for sensors that would relay … Read more

The U.S. Army has successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft that can travel five times the speed of sound and reach anywhere on Earth in under an hour.

Described by the Pentagon as a "glide vehicle, designed to fly within the earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speed and long range," the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) was launched aboard a rocket from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii.

It hit a target at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 2,300 miles away, in less than 30 minutes, according to Department of Defense and AP reports. … Read more

Call them a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

The metallic microlattice, as the researchers call it, could be useful for absorbing sound, vibration, and shock. Other possibilities, according to HRL: electrodes that could … Read more

Love brainteasers? Brainiacs from a California university hope you can help decipher a mind-draining 10,000-piece puzzle through their collaborative Web site.

The DARPA Shredder Challenge aims to discover new ways the U.S. military can process and decode shredded documents confiscated in war zones, as well as test vulnerabilities in the shredding methods used by the U.S. national security community.

The Shredder Challenge is made up of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the documents' subject matter, and the shredding methods vary to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants must provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document.

Three out of the five puzzles are still available to be solved before the contest ends December 4 and DARPA awards $50,000 as the prize. Manuel Cebrian, a research scientist at the University of California at San Diego, and a team from UCSD have created a way to solve the remaining enigmas by "combining advanced computer vision methods with shared tasking and referral-based crowdsourcing," says the USCD Web site. … Read more