Military technology doesn’t simply spring forth fully formed from a DARPA engineer’s head like some GI Athena. It requires extensive development cycles and field testing before it’s put on the front lines. At this year’s semi-annual Network Integration Evaluations (NIE) at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, Army researchers put a trio of technologies through their paces. Technologies that could radically alter how future wars are waged by delivering a more complete battlefield view to troops in the line of fire.
If there are two things in this world that folks just do not respect, it’s the US Congress and the obscene amounts of torque that an electric engine can produce. And like its two-wheeled brethren
This is no lumbering Staten Island Ferry. This is the Francisco, a wave-piercing catamaran loaded with modified jet engines set to blast commuters across the River Plate at 58 knots, faster than any other ship in the world.
The P-51 Mustang is one of the most iconic aircraft in aviation history. These long-range, single-seater fighter-bombers served throughout the Second World War as well as during in Korea before being relegated to scrap yards. But many have survived, some in the most unlikely of places. You’ll never guess what quiet suburb the Lil’ Margaret was found in.
The Sun actually gets hotter as you travel away from its surface, jumping from 6,000 K there to over 1,000,000 K a few million kilometers above in the corona. This effect contributes to solar flares that can damage earthbound electronics and we have no idea how it does this. But NASA is about to find out thanks to the IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) spacecraft that just launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base today.
Didier Esteyne and EADS turned heads at the 2011 Paris Air Show when they debuted the the world’s first all-electric airplane, the single-seat Cri-Cri. Fast forward two years, and the miniscule Cri-Cri has grown into a sleek tandem-seat training craft that’s as green as it is acrobatic.
If you thought the prospect of being chased down by one of DARPA’s terminator-wannabes
Keeping Afghanistan’s roads free of improvised explosive devices is no easy feat when important routes are re-mined within hours of EOD teams clearing them. That’s why US Army has deployed the Buffalo: a six-wheeled, 38-ton, armor-plated supertruck designed to demolish roadside bombs with abandon.
Your average atom is about 62 to 520 picometers in diameter, but since that’s a full factor smaller than the 390 to 700 nanometers human eye can perceive, direct observation using conventional microscopes is physically impossible. But that’s where the electron beams come in. The University of Victoria has just installed the most powerful scanning electron microscope in history.
The ability to drop bombs on targets a continent away can be a huge tactical advantage (even if it is just saber-rattling