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A prototype military transport aircraft made by Russia’s Ilyushin has crashed during a test flight, killing three people who were on board. A video of the incident shows the plane’s right engine flaming out before the aircraft tilts to the side and crashes near the Kubinka airfield outside Moscow. The new light military transport plane, Il-112V, crashed in a forested area as it was coming in for a landing at the Kubinka airfield about 45 kilometers west of Moscow, spokespeople of the corporation told the Tass news agency. According to Russian news agency TASS, among those onboard was the Hero...

The aircraft is actually an example of trying to focus too much on proven designs and common parts. While it incorporated the most powerful inline engine available at the time – an Allison V-3420, which provided 2,885 horsepower – and featured a design that utilized many components from other aircraft to help expedite production, flight tests revealed unsatisfactory performance.

The Border Patrol stressed all the structures served a purpose - providing a basis for the current design being implemented throughout the U.S.-Mexico border. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) constructed eight different wall prototypes to be assessed and evaluated for performance, constructability, and deployability to satisfy the U.S. Border Patrol’s (USBP) operational requirements. At the conclusion of the testing and evaluation, the information gathered enabled USBP to select attributes which have been incorporated into the border barrier toolkit and may be applied to future construction project designs. Because this location is where CBP is constructing Secondary wall, the prototypes...

A test version of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, Starship, partially burst apart during ground tests in Texas today, erupting plumes of gas and sending some pieces of hardware soaring into the sky. Live streams set up by local space enthusiasts captured the failure in real time this afternoon. The explosive result occurred while SpaceX was seemingly conducting some pressure tests with the vehicle at the company’s test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The local live streams showed the vehicle venting gas periodically throughout the day, indicating that testing was underway. Now, that timeline is almost certain to shift. After the explosion,...

Amazon is still working on a robot that will roam around homes... A prototype of the robot, codenamed “Vesta,” ... is capable of moving around on its own using built-in cameras, according to the report. A similar report last April revealed that Amazon is interested in creating home robots that might be able to provide access to the company’s Amazon Alexa voice assistant no matter where you are. Amazon has continued to invest in robotics and in June introduced new warehouse robots including the Pegasus and Xanthus. Amazon typically holds big product reveal events at its Seattle headquarters in September....

Companies vying to build President Donald Trump’s promised border wall started creating prototypes late last year. Fisher Sand & Gravel is one of four companies selected to create a prototype for the proposed border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. CEO Tommy Fisher joined today’s show to talk about the measurements and building process proposed by his company. The proposed design would be built with the goal of a 150-year lifespan. It would be “solid concrete,” measuring 32 feet high and 2 and a half feet thick. According to Fisher, the wall could start construction as soon as April if...

Eight different prototype designs for President Trump’s border wall are being erected in San Diego to begin testing. Each structure has to meet certain physical requirements, while also being able to withstand damage from handheld tools and other devices.

Amazon is offering a closer look at the drones it plans to use to eventually deliver customers' packages, nearly two years to the day after the Internet retailer first teased us with its ambitions for the unmanned aerial vehicles. In a video posted to YouTube on Sunday (embedded below), Amazon showed off a new prototype drone it hopes to use to deliver small packages to customers in fewer than 30 minutes. Unlike a previous demonstration offered by Amazon that showed packages being carried below the drone, the new video shows the prototype accepting a package into its fuselage before delivery.

G.E. Hardiman I – Ralph Mosher (American) Hardiman is a name derived somehow, from "Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation." and Man from MANipulator. Sometimes written as HardiMan, Hardi-Man, Hardi Man, Hardiman I. Said to also be officially called the "Powered Exo-skeleton." Note: some reports suggest that only one arm of Hardiman's was built. The above photo usually accompanies that comment, but it is incorrect. A complete Hardiman was built with both arms, but the comment refers to the earlier tests of just the single, upper manipulator. Later, even when the full machine was built, one side was made static,...

Gawker Media said on Monday that computers belonging to one of its editors, Jason Chen, were seized from his home on Friday as part of what appeared to be an investigation into the sale of a next-generation iPhone. One of Gawker’s blogs, Gizmodo, published articles last week about the future phone after purchasing the device for $5,000 from a person who found it at a bar in California last month. Gawker’s chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, said it expected the immediate return of the computers and servers.

Be sure to scroll all the way down and see the 3 carriers and the new fighter jet. The specs are awesome. Talk about whip lash. Credit should be given to the female pilot. Boeing does it again... 3 Carrier Groups and Boeing 797 - A New Way To Fly

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.By Tyler Hamilton General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers,...

Pardon the cliche, but it's one of the holiest of Holy Grails of technology: Wireless power. And while early lab experiments have been able to "beam" electricity a few feet to power a light bulb, the day when our laptops and cell phones can charge without having to plug them in to a wall socket still seems decades in the future. Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power....

By now, just about everyone and their mother should be aware that Bushmaster Firearms (now wholly owned by seemingly unstoppable and more-than-a-little-ominous, voracious and rapacious gun-company-gobbling juggernaut Cerberus Capital Management, L.P.) will be manufacturing the multi-caliber MagPul Masada assault rifle/carbine under the name "Adaptive Combat Rifle", or "ACR" for short. But another MagPul item has been getting a good bit of press since the show, as well, and that's the slick little MagPul FMG9 (or, FMG-9) prototype folding 9mm Parabellum (9x19mm NATO ) mini / micro-submachine gun (SMG) that utilizes a Glock 17 slide and any factory Glock 9mm magazine,...

A bionic eye implant that could help restore the sight of millions of blind people could be available to patients within two years. US researchers have been given the go-ahead to implant the prototype device in 50 to 75 patients. The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to feed visual information to electrodes in the eye. Patients who tested less-advanced versions of the retinal implant were able to see light, shapes and movement. "What we are trying to do is take real-time images from a camera and convert them into tiny electrical pulses that would jump-start the otherwise...

2/14/2006 - SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) -- A high-flying prototype “Airman” is heading home after being deployed more than four years and flying 4,245 hours supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and the Combined Task Force-Horn of Africa. Global Hawk Air Vehicle No. 3 began its journey back home at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Feb. 10, and is expected to land there Feb. 16. This unmanned aerial vehicle, AV-3, first deployed as a prototype during the build-up for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002. It returned to Edwards for a couple of months and then was recalled by U.S. Central...

In an attempt to pre-empt computer hackers, Microsoft is developing "virtual" PCs to scour the web for previously unseen attack code. At the software giant's Cybersecurity and Systems Management lab, based in Washington State, US, researchers are building a squad of the virtual PCs - created in software rather than hardware - to explore the darker corners of the world wide web. To any website they visit, the machines appear to be a normal home computer. But the PCs are seeking out code designed to attack a computer and will sound an alarm if any code is executed in contravention...

ATK XM25 25mm Grenade Launcher for Future Infantry. Will it fly? Posted on Friday, May 06 @ 12:36:05 PDT by davidc by David Cranedavid@defensereview.com DefenseReview plans to report in detail on the ATK XM25 air-burst assault weapon in an upcoming article. Before we do that, however, we're going to do a little light coverage in this one: The XM25 is an offshoot of the U.S. Army/JSSAP/Picatinny Arsenal, NJ XM29/OICW. It's no secret that we here at DefRev weren't big fans of this system. The XM29/OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon) combined a semi-auto 20mm grenade multiple grenade launcher (MGL)--utilizing high-explosive...

<p>The U.S. Navy plans to begin testing a prototype for an unmanned underwater glider with a flying-wing design in March, according to the Office of Naval Research, which funds the project.</p> <p>If successful, tests of the Flying Wing Underwater Glider could lead to a new generation of gliders that researchers expect to be the largest and fastest to date. They would be capable of traveling thousands of miles under ocean waves, quietly conducting surveillance and gathering data for military and civilian purposes, researchers said. "Gliders have the potential of providing long-endurance mobile platforms for employing sensors," said Thomas Franklin Swean Jr., team leader for Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems Science and Technology at the Office of Naval Research, which has spent $500,000 on the project so far. "The endurance is measured in months rather than hours or days."</p>

Issue 31. January - February 1999 LABORATORY DEVELOPMENT OF CONVENTIONAL WARHEADS Anatoly Mikhailov, Deputy Chief Designer, Head of the Gas Dynamics Research Section, Russian Federal Nuclear Center   To continue a series of publications dedicated to the Russian Federal Nuclear Center All-Russia Research Institute of Experimental Physics (RFYaTs-VNIIEF), and its role in the advanced development of conventional weapons, we shall focus on the Institute s gas dynamics research which constitutes a major aspect of warhead research development. The research in the field of gas dynamics, together with theoretical projections and computer modeling, help determine warhead physical configuration and its basic design....