News Releases

"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...

By Gail Cleere, Office of Naval Research For as long as we’ve been building boats and putting them in the water, we’ve been battling those pesky little ocean critters that want to attach themselves to our boats for a free ride. The ubiquitous, determined barnacle — not to mention tubeworms, oysters...

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...

Sometimes, good ideas materialize in some very unlikely places. Take spatial perception for instance. Navy Captain Angus Rupert took a recreational parachute jump back in the 70's, and in his free-fall toward the ground realized that even while tumbling he could tell the direction of down just by...

In 1996, in the moonless pre-dawn hours when the Atlantic seas were only two-feet high, a crash shattered the night. The Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the guided-missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf had collided at a closing speed of 20 knots. The subsequent investigation put the blame...

No question about it… spiny lobsters aren't pretty. Keith Ward, chair of ONR's Biomolecular and Biosystems Science and Technology Group, doesn't particularly like their looks either, but he knows their sense of smell is astounding. Researchers funded by Ward figure that a lobster's extraordinary...

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...

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...

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...

Things are crackling on the giant Jovian moon, Europa, and a group of earth-bound ocean scientists funded by the Office of Naval Research are intrigued… could Jupiter's Europa be hiding an ocean of water under that icy surface? A salty ocean… larger than all the oceans of the earth combined? The...