News Releases

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...