News Releases

Cruise missiles have proven themselves in combat many times since the Gulf War, but the Navy would like to drive their cost down—the ones currently in service cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has a program to use commercially-based equipment to build a...

Have a hankering to chill your Cherry Garcia™ and to listen to Jerry Garcia using the same system? The concept may not be too far off. The Office of Naval Research has long funded researchers at Penn State who now have proved they can build a compact freezer case substituting sound waves for...

Solid-state semiconductors don't handle heat very well. If they're operated at high power, they tend to burn out. Heat poses other problems as well—the hotter the device, the greater the electrical resistance (and the lower the efficiency). Digital semiconductor devices also have capacitive elements...

In today's new world of network centric warfare, where there is an ever-greater dependence on vast amounts of information that must be received and transmitted, too many antennas are a shipboard problem. They're heavy, they tend to interfere with one another, and they're unstealthy because they...

Shooting down enemy air threats—whether they're ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or aircraft—is a tactical problem that leaves little room for error. The targets move fast and must be verifiably, catastrophically, destroyed. An incoming missile hit and broken into pieces by an air defense...

Stovepipes—old "legacy" software you've bought and can't easily replace—that can't work together are one of the biggest obstacles to getting the most out of information technology. This is especially true in Naval operations. Sailors and Marines use many systems that have been acquired over the...

As the services scramble to adapt to 21st century visions of "network-centric warfare" that call for vast growth in tactical information exchange, they'll be looking for innovative ways to multiply communications networking capabilities—while slashing costs. All the services are looking at...

Hitoshi Narita tells us that as a child growing up in Nagoya, Japan, he was fascinated by large structures…airplanes, ships, trains… anything that was large, mechanical, and moved. Watching the large cargo ships coming in and out of the ports near his home, he knew even then that he wanted to be...

If you know anything about methane gas – and the Office of Naval Research thinks you should – it probably has something to do with swamp gas, and a faintly unpleasant sulfurous smell that rises from country marshes on sultry, summer evenings, or perhaps – for more romantic types – stories of Will-o'...

For the last 50 years, the Office of Naval Research has been in the business of guiding the most "imaginative research" * found across the country. Technologies taken for granted today – the cell phone, the Global Positioning System, the laser, the national bone marrow donor program, for example –...