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That bar code on your cereal box holds information read by a laser scanner. It's not much information, but it's enough to let the supermarket take your money, keep track of inventory, follow trends in customer preference, and restock its shelves. Scanners and bar codes speed up checkout, but they've...

Shooting down enemy air threats—whether they're ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or aircraft—is a tactical problem that leaves little room for error. The targets move fast and must be verifiably, catastrophically, destroyed. An incoming missile hit and broken into pieces by an air defense...

In the deep waters two miles south of Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, not far from where, two centuries ago, the likes of Captain Ahab and a thousand others kept their watch for the great white and his kin, we are now searching to understand another potential beast in those parts: the ocean and the...

Have a hankering to chill your Cherry Garcia™ and to listen to Jerry Garcia using the same system? The concept may not be too far off. The Office of Naval Research has long funded researchers at Penn State who now have proved they can build a compact freezer case substituting sound waves for...

Solid-state semiconductors don't handle heat very well. If they're operated at high power, they tend to burn out. Heat poses other problems as well—the hotter the device, the greater the electrical resistance (and the lower the efficiency). Digital semiconductor devices also have capacitive elements...

What does remote sensing for camouflaged enemy ground vehicles have to do with breast cancer diagnosis? By next year, perhaps plenty. A smart sensor fusion algorithm modeled on the human visual/brain "unsupervised" learning system and a 200 channel hyperspectral remote sensing capability have been...

No question about it, Toto and Auntie Em could have used a few extra minutes to find Dorothy and get into the storm cellar. When severe weather sweeps through an area, every second of warning time is critical. More time equals more lives saved — the equation is that simple. A unique partnership has...

In today's new world of network centric warfare, where there is an ever-greater dependence on vast amounts of information that must be received and transmitted, too many antennas are a shipboard problem. They're heavy, they tend to interfere with one another, and they're unstealthy because they...

As the services scramble to adapt to 21st century visions of "network-centric warfare" that call for vast growth in tactical information exchange, they'll be looking for innovative ways to multiply communications networking capabilities—while slashing costs. All the services are looking at...

If you know anything about methane gas – and the Office of Naval Research thinks you should – it probably has something to do with swamp gas, and a faintly unpleasant sulfurous smell that rises from country marshes on sultry, summer evenings, or perhaps – for more romantic types – stories of Will-o'...