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Starshine-2, the third in a programmed series of mirror-covered satellites built with help by students from around the world, will be launched from the Space Shuttle Endeavor on November 29th. Two other similar satellites have already been launched and placed in orbit (Starshine-1 was launched in...

For hundreds of millions of years, plankton - those tiny drifting sea creatures found throughout the ocean - have been raining unceasingly on the sea floor as individuals die. There they've been deposited as organic (reduced carbon) matter in the sediment. This organic matter is a rich and...

The United States Navy and Marine Corps are an expeditionary team. Thus they operate in the littorals-in the sea and on the land along the coastline. Expeditionary work takes a very different set of operational capabilities from those needed in blue-water fleet operations. The Navy must bring in the...

Physicists deal with unimaginable things… things such as liquids that can flow without resistance. Superfluid helium-3 is one such liquid, but it exists only at an equally unimaginable temperature, a thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Yet, because it flows without resistance, it flows...

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...

Catching a wave is one thing. Actually harnessing one and making it somehow useful is quite another. But, that's exactly what engineers at Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) in New Jersey are doing, with Office of Naval Research's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding. The idea of using the...

Students don't ordinarily build satellites. And satellites aren't usually launched in Alaska. But Starshine-3 and PC-Sat are not your ordinary satellites. On August 31st, Starshine-3, built with the help of hundreds of grade school students from around the world, and PC-Sat, designed and built from...

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...