News Releases

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...

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...

There is momentous news inside the Arctic Circle. It's getting warmer!; and in the world of polar science (where everyone knows that ice affects the Earth's temperature) the experts are getting restless. As more and more ice melts, there is less of it around to reflect the Sun's rays back into space...

Canines are known for their sensitive sniffers, but now scientists have developed an artificial nose that can operate without chow or regular walks and won't bark at squirrels. Researchers at Tufts University constructed an electronic nose that has about 20 attributes of living noses and their...

Imagine the Marine on a reconnaissance mission who must know now just what's over the hill in front of him. Imagine a 4 pound glider that fits in a backpack, has the radar signature of a bird, comes packed with a video eye, can be assembled and launched in less than 5 minutes, and comes complete...

No bones about it, few would guess that the Office of Naval Research is the backbone of the National Bone Marrow Donor Program. In the 1950s, the Navy emerged as a pioneer in figuring out how to keep the body from rejecting organ transplants, including bone marrow transplants. For a bone marrow...

The technology has applications for surveillance, information security, access control, identity fraud, gang tracking, banking and finding missing children. It is currently being evaluated for use in airport security and as a counter-terrorism tool. Last February Dr. Atick's work was selected by...

Our brains excel at all kinds of things, but when neurobiologists and psychobiologists try to reverse engineer certain brain functions in order to produce a machine or system that might mimic some of the brain's extraordinary abilities, more often than not they fail (or at least engineer something...

"I want you to think out of the box," said the Chief of Naval Research, Rear Admiral Jay Cohen to Paul Lowell when he tasked him to find some different - perhaps high-risk - answers to some of the Navy's most challenging problems. "And you may fail most of the time…. that's no problem. The bigger...

Objects shrouded by smoke, fog, dust or camouflage can be isolated and identified by a special camera developed by Office of Naval Research-funded researchers. This device aids human vision, which does not have the capability of seeing very far into the infrared region of the electromagnetic visual...