News Releases

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...