News Releases

In a wind tunnel in Hampton, Virginia , on the 30th of May this year, a new kind of cruise missile engine, called a scramjet, was fired up. Just like any other cruise missile engine, it used conventional liquid hydrocarbon fuel, but this one was a mite different. In simulated hypersonic conditions...

Scientist John Reintjes is what you might call a 'build a better mousetrap' type-of-guy. About ten years ago, he watched as Navy ships took regular oil samples from their lubricating systems and sent them ashore to be analyzed. Fine debris and particulate matter suspended in a ship's oil reservoirs...

A new type of analog processor that is compact while offering extremely fast computations for image processing could possibly lead to the creation of an artificial eye that has the potential to replace damaged human retinas, offering sight to the blind if the chip works as planned. The cellular...

Dreaming of the potential of thermocouple devices? Well, perhaps not… but maybe you should. The October 11th issue of the respected British science journal Nature says there has been a major breakthrough recently in the world of thermoelectric materials.

Starshine-2, the third in a programmed series of mirror-covered satellites built with help by students from around the world, will be launched from the Space Shuttle Endeavor on November 29th. Two other similar satellites have already been launched and placed in orbit (Starshine-1 was launched in...

How to make a robotic arm that is able to flex in an infinite number of ways and order it to do so without disorder and confusion? Get yourself an octopus and study it. That is exactly what researchers funded by the Office of Naval Research are doing. Octopuses are boneless, brainy, and ancient...

A researcher working under an Office of Naval Research grant is just a couple of months away from completing a prototype detector designed to sound the alarm when airborne microbes such as anthrax are in the air. Dr. Jeanne Small, a biophysicist and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Eastern...

When landline communications links are on the fritz and the job is too massive for local cellular communications, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., stands ready to answer the call. NRL has outfitted Humvees with the capability of immediately providing two-way satellite...

Arlington, VA -- Some 40,000 children from 26 countries around the world are participants in Project Starshine, a series of satellites that will measure the effects of solar storms on the earth's upper atmosphere. Starshine 3, is scheduled to be launched from Kodiak, Alaska on September 21st at 9:00...

In about half a second, the human brain (specifically the superior colliculus) will analyze its current environment, and then decide whether or not one thing or another is worth taking any notice of. Exactly how the brain does this is still somewhat a mystery, but we do know that the more sensory...