News Releases

For hundreds of millions of years, plankton - those tiny drifting sea creatures found throughout the ocean - have been raining unceasingly on the sea floor as individuals die. There they've been deposited as organic (reduced carbon) matter in the sediment. This organic matter is a rich and...

What: Fourth Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition When: Thursday, July 12 to Sunday, July 15, 2001 Where: U.S. Naval Academy, Hubbard Hall, Annapolis, MD. See 12 teams of college and high school student engineers pit their unmanned submersible vehicles for $20,000 in prizes...

Students don't ordinarily build satellites. And satellites aren't usually launched in Alaska. But Starshine-3 and PC-Sat are not your ordinary satellites. On August 31st, Starshine-3, built with the help of hundreds of grade school students from around the world, and PC-Sat, designed and built from...

Physicists deal with unimaginable things… things such as liquids that can flow without resistance. Superfluid helium-3 is one such liquid, but it exists only at an equally unimaginable temperature, a thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Yet, because it flows without resistance, it flows...

For centuries, schoolchildren have recited the tale of the demise of England's King Henry I, a cruel medieval monarch (blinded one kinsman, imprisoned another for 28 years) who died in a wretched state (so we're told) after dining on "…a surfeit of eels of which he was inordinately fond" thus...

In many domestic and exotic animal species, immunization with killed or live infectious organisms is an effective, low-risk, and relatively inexpensive method of protection against common infectious diseases. But they haven't worked in marine mammals and this is of concern to Navy veterinarians at...

The United States Navy and Marine Corps are an expeditionary team. Thus they operate in the littorals-in the sea and on the land along the coastline. Expeditionary work takes a very different set of operational capabilities from those needed in blue-water fleet operations. The Navy must bring in the...

Tethered and put through their paces in the lab, they tend to get a bit cranky. But they have the most sensitive noses on the planet, fantastic internal gyros, the most complex visual system known, and muscles so powerful they can instantly lift twice their own body weight. So, scientists are...

The brain is a remarkable piece of work. At a given moment, from a blizzard of incoming data - visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, taste, memory, etc. - it knows instantly how to classify what information it wants, and discard or store the rest. One sound in a roomful of noise. One object in...

Catching a wave is one thing. Actually harnessing one and making it somehow useful is quite another. But, that's exactly what engineers at Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) in New Jersey are doing, with Office of Naval Research's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding. The idea of using the...