• Midwest floods to create record dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

    Each year, an influx of nutrients — mainly nitrogen — which come from fertilizers flushed out of the Mississippi basin creates dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — zones where there is not enough oxygen to sustain life; the summer’s Midwest floods flush record levels of nutrients into the Gulf, creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey

  • Smart-card manufacturers sues to suppress security flaw information

    NXP Semiconductors is suing Radboud University Nijmegen to prevent university researchers from presenting a paper in an October conference on IT security; paper in question details serious security flaws in the company’s RFID chip

  • GAO strongly criticizes DoE over Hanford clean-up

    More than 210 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford in Washington State; most are more than fifty years old; GAO says there now “serious questions about the tanks’ long-term viability”

  • Powerful laser blinds Moscow partygoers

    Organizers of a rave party north of Moscow use a powerful laser to beam the partygoers, causing retinal burns and permanent eye damage to many; engineers accuse party organizers of “technical illiteracy”

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  • AMEC-led consortium to clean up Sellafield

    Treating and cleaning nuclear waste is part and parcel of nuclear power generation; The U.K. government, a proponent of greater reliance on nuclear power, takes steps to deal with legacy waste problems

  • Bioterrorism target for ventilation research

    Designing new HVAC systems for buildings would help tackle major threats to public safety including the release of noxious chemicals and bio-agents into public buildings

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  • Alternative fuels for the aviation industry

    Rolls-Royce, British Airways collaborate on developing and testing alternative fuels for aviation; testing is expected to be complete by the end of March 2009, after which the results will be analyzed and reported

  • Students compete in future airplane design competition

    Teams from fourteen colleges and universities around the world compete in imagining what the next generation of airliners and cargo planes may look like; Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA, and one of the judges, said: “The invention, imagination and engineering exhibited in these college proposals was extraordinary, and in parts superior to the concepts prevalent in the current professional literature”

  • U.S. intelligence services aware of vast Chinese espionage campaign

    Multifaceted Chinese espionage campaign in the United States and other Western countries aims not only to steal military secrets, but also industrial secrets and intellectual property in order to help Chinese companies better compete in the global economy; Chinese government and state-sponsored industries have relied not only on trained intelligence officers, but also on the Chinese diaspora — using immigrants, students, and people of second- and third-generation Chinese heritage

  • German-Japanese collaboration on carbon dioxide recovery

    Mitsubishi, E.ON to test a system which recovers carbon dioxide from flue-gas emissions at a coal-fired power plant in Germany

  • Robot sub recharger

    Autonomous underwater vehicles perform more and more missions for both scientific research and security; charging their batteries, though, has always been a problem; a new patent application offers a solution

  • Acoustic cloak silences nuisance noise

    Spanish researchers prove metamaterials can be designed to produce an acoustic cloak — a cloak that can make objects impervious to sound waves

  • Wireless communication under water

    Acoustic time reversal cleans up underwater sound signals, extending their range and capacity

  • GM, Carnegie Mellon collaborate on autonomous driving

    General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University have collaborated on an autonomous vehicle which was entered in DARPA 2007 Urban Challenge competition; the now commit to expanding their collaboration with the aim of accelerating the emerging field of autonomous driving

  • Unmanned Ground Systems Summit: Early Bird Special

    Unmanned systems perform more and more missions that used to be performed by humans; the Pentagon plans to spend about $4 billion on robots by 2010; IDGA holds ground robots summit in D.C. this August