News Releases

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...