Crave

(Credit: G-NUIS)

This golf cart-sized, cheetah-spotted buggy could be bad news for those guys who make a living driving up and down the fence lines of Podunk facilities around the country while drinking bad coffee.

The Guardium UGV (unmanned ground system) employs state-of-the-art technologies and any number of payloads to guard places like airports, energy plants and military bases-24/7, rain or shine and without the need for 7-11 pit stops.

A joint venture between G-NUIS Unmanned Ground Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Elbit Systems Ltd., the Guardium is an all terrain vehicle that takes care of itself.

It uses autonomous decision-making and persistent navigation to overcome poor GPS conditions, deal with obstacles and other variables as well as to plan and replan routes in real time.

Weather impervious panoramic artificial imaging, video compression, data fusion and wireless commo make this one intrusive little SOB.

While this UGV was designed for routine missions, such as programmed patrols along a perimeter and other security routines, it can also react to "unscheduled events." It can also be used for combat support.

In event of a perimeter breach, say along the Rio Grande, one version of this unit could be immediately dispatched "to isolate, contain and control intruders" until backup arrives, according to the company. Fence? We don't need no stinkin' fence.

Correction 10:35 a.m. PST: This blog initially misidentified the prime minister of Israel. He is Ehud Olmert. It also misidentified the person whose speech can be found on the Project Better Place Web site--it is by Shai Agassi--and as such an earlier version of this post also incorrectly attributed a quote from that speech.

Renault-Nissan, the government of Israel, and an electric charging station start-up founded by Shai Agassi are mounting an effort to make electric cars part of ordinary life in Israel in the next decade.

Project Better Place, Agassi's organization, will try to build 500,000 electric charging stations in the country, according to the organization. At some these stations, attendants will swap out depleted batteries and put in fully charged ones. This saves the several hours typically required to charge a lithium-ion battery pack made for cars. (You can also charge the batteries at home.) Renault-Nissan, meanwhile, will ship electric cars to the country in three years or so. Ultimately, the company hopes to ship 10,000 to 20,000 a year.

The announcement was made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, and Agassi in Israel on Monday. Agassi's speech can be found on the Project Better Place site.

Israel has been considered Project Better Place's likely starting point. Agassi is an Israeli and the bulk of the company's $200 million in funds comes from investors in Israel. The country also relies on imported oil yet it remains locked in conflict with several Arab oil-exporting nations. Agassi in an interview last year said the organization was concentrating on islands, but added that an island can be part of a continent and isolated in other ways.

Israel is also small, which makes it an easier market for electric cars as well as companies building electric charging stations. Electric cars can only go so far without a charge or a new battery. Ghosn said that the company's cars would go about 100 kilometers (45 miles) in the city and 160 kilometers (72 miles) on the highway on a charge, according to a Reuters story. Some surveys in the U.S. say buyers generally want to see a 200-mile range on an electric car. The relatively short range of electric cars has been one of the primary reasons they haven't moved into the mainstream, according to electric car execs, battery execs, and some academics. With all the major cities crammed pretty close to each other as in Israel, the range problem shrinks.

Among large car makers, Renault-Nissan is one of the more aggressive when it comes to fully electric cars. At Tokyo's Ceatec conference in October, Nissan execs told CNET News.com that the company wants to start to put out fully electric cars by 2011 or 2012.

The cars will run on batteries being developed under a deal between Renault-Nissan and NEC.

"Mother of Satan"--that's what bomb makers call peroxide-based explosives like triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which are easy to make and hard to detect. But a new pen-shaped detector doodad offers hope for those doing time in airport security lines.

(Credit: Acro)

The Peroxide Explosives Tester, or PET, by Acro is supposed to help security personnel quickly and accurately identify peroxide-based explosives, from diacetone diperoxide and hexam-methalene-triperoxidediamine to the notorious TATP, a component allegedly used by Mr. Goofy in the shoe bomb he tried to detonate on a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001.

Acro announced this month that it had licensed the explosives testing kit technology from Life Science Research Israel, a subsidiary of the Israel Institute for Biological Research.

Peroxide is what bombers from London and Madrid to Casablanca and the streets of Israel all have in common nowadays, and unfortunately we're not talking about their roots. It's also what caused the hoopla over liquid explosives in London in 2006 and subsequent banning of all carry-on bottled goods.

The chemical generally comes as an innocuous-appearing solid that looks like sugar, a class of explosive that's almost impossible to detect with dogs or conventional high-tech methods. To make matters worse, it's easy to whip up at home with ingredients available at any supermarket.

Testing with the new device sounds easy enough: Insert the sample into PET and inject the secret sauce; if it turns green-blue, dive for cover. The company says it's also disposable and nonpolluting, but there's no word on how it's expected to be applied to mass screenings.

There's already a constituency opposed to readmitting fluids to your carry-on--the people who charge $2 for a pint of water in the departure lounge.

Three aircraft in the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) pipeline promise to change some assumptions we have about air travel--the assumption that there's a pilot in the cockpit, for instance.

(Credit: IAI)

In the works is an unmanned cargo plane with a 30-ton payload capacity. IAI could have gone for an unmanned passenger jet--the technology does exists--but "the world is not yet ready to be flown without a pilot at the stick," Shlomo Tsach, IAI director of flight sciences, told the Jerusalem Post. "A psychological obstacle needs to be overcome before people are willing to fly in unmanned planes." Ya think?

No such reservations however, when it comes to consigning innocent cargo to the uncharted skies of unmanned delivery. While most people admit they would not get on an unmanned flight themselves, they had no problem sending their cargo that way, according a Boeing poll quoted by the Post.

The Israelis have two other projects they say will "revolutionize civilian and military aviation": an eco-friendly inter-city commuter aircraft powered by fuel cells and a drone called the Sun Sailor, a solar-powered UAV that weighs 4 kilograms and is capable of carrying a small digital camera or other detection equipment. The latter should be able to stay up indefinitely because it has no need to refuel. The 10-seat commuter, which runs on fuel cells, is supposed to reduce noise and exhaust pollution, plus it's expected to be a stepping stone for the use of alternative energy in other aircraft.

That's not the end of it. We'll all have a chance to fly pilot-less soon enough, according to Tsach. "Once the new cargo plane takes to the air, it will only be a matter of time before there also are unmanned passenger planes." Quick! Drop a dime to the Airline Pilots Association.

Camero, a company out of Israel that has developed a camera that can "see" things through solid walls, has raised $14 million, bringing the total is has raised to $20 million.

The investment comes about four months after it showed off a prototype of the Xaver800 and began to sell systems to customers. Investors include Greylock Partners, Motorola Ventures and Walden.

The Xaver800 camera module

(Credit: Camero)

The Xaver800 doesn't technically capture images directly. Instead, it issues ultrawideband signals and the data harvested is then used to create 3D models of things the signals bounced off of. The trick is that the camera can capture the signals in cluttered environments or through solid objects. Researchers at U.S. universities are working on similar projects.

The camera is only sold to military and police agencies.

Camero's work typifies the state of the growing high tech industry in Israel. While some multinationals have come out of the country, the local industry thrives mostly on scads of start-ups with relatively futuristic technologies, often associated with the military.

As a result, it's one of the places on the globe where the IPO is still a big deal. Last year, 20 Israeli companies held public offerings. More tech IPOs occurred in the U.S. but the U.S. is also bigger. Seventy six local companies got merged or acquired. The total value of mergers came to $10.6 billion, according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center.