Source: PopSci

Smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S. is distressingly simple—all someone needs is a truck full of watermelons. Regulations prohibit using high-power x-rays on perishables, and Geiger counters don’t beep alerts because the juicy fruit absorbs radiation. But a new drive-through detector takes advantage of cosmic rays to locate any nuclear material, no matter how cleverly hidden.

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search. Read more here. 

Source: 

So far this hurricane season, the Atlantic has been quiet. That's good news for Gulf oil spill cleanup efforts, but a team of NASA and NOAA scientists are hoping things will get just a little nastier.

This weekend, NASA is launching a six-week mission to study the formation and intensification of hurricanes, hoping to inform forecast models and improve hurricane prediction abilities. TheGRIP experiment (for Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) involves more than a dozen satellite-quality scientific instruments onboard a Global Hawk unmanned drone, a converted WB-57 cold-war bomber and a modified DC-8. Read more here. 

Source: Popsci

Future airplane flocks would require a trained corps of pilots who intimately know their aircraft and their partners’ flying habits. Drone flocks would be a different task, however. Drones are not as smart as pilots, and cannot tell what other aircraft will do. But the military would like to change that.

The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is asking engineers to design an algorithm that would allow drones to recognize the intent of other aircraft. Read more here. 

Source: OptoIQ

Palmdale, CA--The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint program by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, achieved a major milestone on May 26 with its first in-flight night observations.

Source: Popsci.com

NASA has just announced the details of its next Mars mission, Curiosity, which will take off between November 25 and December 18, 2011. Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars between August 6 and August 20, 2012. The rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, will study the Martian surface for conditions favoring the development of microbial life. NASA plans to let Curiosity explore Mars for a full Martian year, or two Earth years. 

Source: R&D Mag

NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites are helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) keep tabs on the extent of the recent Gulf oil spill with satellite images from time to time. NOAA is the lead agency on oil spills and uses airplane fly-overs to assess oil spill extent. Read more here

Source: R&D Mag

Every week is busy for the military’s aeronautical research arms, but this one was special: a new version of a space shuttle-like X-plane flew to the Arctic under remote control, and the world’s fastest suborbital “plane”, the Falcon flying wing, crashed out on the first of two test flights. And there’s a lot more weirdness to come.

Hypersonic wing lost in maiden flight

With the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2, the quest for high speed in Earth’s atmosphere is vaulted to a whole new level. The Falcon was designed to perform almost literally like a meteor, streaking through the atmosphere at a low angle.Read more here

Source: R&D Mag

In its first five years in orbit, NASA's Swift satellite has given astronomers more than they could have hoped for. Its discoveries range from a nearby nascent supernova to a blast so far away that it happened when our universe was only 5 percent of its present age. Read more here

Source: R&D Mag

NASA, U.S. Navy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego researchers have successfully demonstrated the first robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy.

The Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC) autonomous underwater vehicle uses a novel thermal recharging engine powered by the natural temperature differences found at different ocean depths. Scalable for use on most robotic oceanographic vehicles, this technology breakthrough could usher in a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles capable of virtually indefinite ocean monitoring for climate and marine animal studies, exploration and surveillance. Read more here.

Source:Defense Tech briefs

Laser-based directed-energy weapons (DEW) are important components for future Army missile defense systems. The diode-pumped, rare-earth (RE)-doped, solid-state laser is a very promising path towards achieving a DEW-sufficient level of average power from a reasonably compact device. Even so, the extreme pump power densities, combined with the inevitable non-radiative losses in the pump-lase process, introduce severe thermal loading in the gain medium. Regardless of the sophistication of the heat removal technique and its efficiency, the gain medium itself is the bottleneck for non-distortive heat removal due to the low thermal conductivity of known gain media compared to that of heat-sinking materials. To read more, click here.