News Releases

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...

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...

Explosives or narcotics concealed in luggage, mailboxes or on a person can't hide from low frequency radio wave pulses which swiftly and safely detect the presence of the offending substance. Based on technology developed by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C.,with...

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...

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 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...

"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...