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Robots Powered by the Ocean Itself

They call them "gliders," but these move through water instead of air. Two new robotic gliders—autonomous underwater vehicles—powered by changes in their own buoyancy or by different temperature layers in the ocean—will be tested opera-tionally off Southern California this winter. Both gliders were...

October 02, 2002

Roger Scramjet

In a wind tunnel in Hampton, Virginia , on the 30th of May this year, a new kind of cruise missile engine, called a scramjet, was fired up. Just like any other cruise missile engine, it used conventional liquid hydrocarbon fuel, but this one was a mite different. In simulated hypersonic conditions...

January 01, 2002

Security and Efficiency for Electrical Power Networks

The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation have formed a new research partnership to increase the security and the efficiency of electrical power distribution networks. This innovative collaboration will treat electrical power distribution as a "socio-technical system"-one that...

March 08, 2002

Show Stoppers

It's hard for ONR's oceanographer Steve Ackleson to believe he hadn't thought of it before: imaging underwater in fluorescent light.* But the first time he did so on a Floridian coral reef, he couldn't believe his eyes. Corals in brilliant colors not visible under sunlight illumination were suddenly...

May 30, 2002

Office of Naval Research Looks to Small Businesses for Wartime Technologies

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is inviting small businesses to develop technologies that offer en-hanced capabilities to Naval forces fighting terrorists. The Navy and Marine Corps are looking for technologies that will help them anticipate, prepare for, recognize, survive, and retaliate against...

March 08, 2002

Smart, But Do They Work Together

Stovepipes—old "legacy" software you've bought and can't easily replace—that can't work together are one of the biggest obstacles to getting the most out of information technology. This is especially true in Naval operations. Sailors and Marines use many systems that have been acquired over the...

December 03, 2002

Snakes, Robots, and the War on Terrorism

It's mighty daunting to be called a " brilliant young innovator" whose " work and ideas are apt to change the world…a visitor from the future, living among us here and now." Talk about pressure. But that's exactly what MIT's Technology Review Magazine called Howie Choset, mechanical engineer and...

November 01, 2002

Tagging the Great White Shark…and a Few of His Friends

What will some 4,000 of the smartest dressed elephant seals, tuna fish, albatrosses, leatherback sea turtles, great white sharks, and other pelagic megafauna in the Pacific all be wearing in the coming seasons? How about the latest in microprocessor-based electronic tags, some no bigger than...

August 22, 2002

The Genius of International Science Collaboration

For the last 50 years, the Office of Naval Research has been in the business of guiding the most "imaginative research" * found across the country. Technologies taken for granted today – the cell phone, the Global Positioning System, the laser, the national bone marrow donor program, for example –...

November 01, 2002

Training to Survive Hypoxia Without Actually Getting It

The Office of Naval Research has funded a successful program to help train naval aviators to recognize the early effects of hypoxia-oxygen starvation. When the brain is starved of oxygen, it starts to shut down by stages-slowed reactions, impaired judgment, disorientation, loss of consciousness, and...

March 19, 2002