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DARPA Z-man program will develop biologically inspired climbing aids to enable soldiers to scale vertical walls constructed from typical building materials, without using ropes or ladders. Geckos, spiders and small animals are the inspiration behind these climbing aids. Nanopatents and innovations - In 2010, DARPA demonstrated a fully loaded soldier (300 lb) wearing reattachable pads (magnets and microspines) scaling a series of 25-foot walls built from mission-relevant materials using Z-Man technology. In 2011, DARPA began the transition of Z-Man prototype technologies (magnets and microspines) to the Armed Services. Draper is a not-for-profit research and development laboratory focused on the design,...

Lockheed Martin, one of the world's largest defense contractors, was hit hard by hackers this week who used falsified SecurID electronic tokens to gain access. The breach threatens the security of vital data on present and future military technology. Which, you know, sucks for us and our allies abroad who depend on Lockheed to help keep us safe during the ongoing violence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It isn't clear what, if anything, was stolen during the breach. It isn't even clear what the hackers want, but the attacks are being traced back to an hacking campaign back in...

It is not uncommon these days to read news articles about breakthrough energy technologies that have the potential to change the energy complex as we know it. There are many researchers working on developing cold fusion, batteries, solar panels, microgenerators, artificial photosynthesis, etc. and every now and then we will hear announcements of important findings that scientists have made. In almost all cases however, the discoveries reporte are made on the experimental level, in laboratory settings and much more time, money and work is required before commercialization will be possible. It seems though that more often than not these technologies...

ARLINGTON, Va.--The Office of Naval Research (ONR) intends to launch on May 16 a new Internet wargame, recruiting a community of more than 1,000 players to collaborate on solving real-world problems facing the Navy. Scheduled to run for three weeks, the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise will recruit online players from across the government to suggest ways of combating piracy off the coast of Somalia. “MMOWGLI is an online game designed to find and collectively grow breakthrough ideas to some of the Navy's most complex problems--those 21st-century threats that demand new forms of collaboration and truly...

Ny Teknik recently participated in two new tests of the Italian ‘energy catalyzer’, providing more accurate measurements to reduce possible error sources. Ny Teknik tested the energy catalyzer The new tests with the energy catalyzer, which seems to generate heat by an unknown nuclear reaction, took place in Bologna on 19 and 28 April, 2011. As in previous tests the objective was to measure the net energy that the device generates as accurately as possible.

I spend much of my time debunking the free energy fantasies of my less technically competent friends. Wishful thinking makes many believe that cars can run on water after seeing a brief youtube video. Lately, however, I have been undergoing an exciting paradigm shift. Remember the “cold fusion” fiasco of 1989? Well, I have come to realize that it wasn’t what it seemed at all. Denial, groupthink, dirty tricks and easily manipulated media combined to create an historical injustice. Two decades have been wasted virtually ignoring this game-changing discovery. Today’s environmental disasters, expensive energy and oil wars could possibly have...

Yesterday, we found out that E Ink Holdings won't be releasing a new electronic paper display until 2012 and now, we know why....

Intego has discovered a rogue anti-malware program called MACDefender, which attacks Macs via SEO poisoning attacks. When a user clicks on a link after performing a search on a search engine such as Google, this takes them to a web site whose page contains JavaScript that automatically downloads a file. In this case, the file downloaded is a compressed ZIP archive, which, if a specific option in a web browser is checked (Open “safe” files after downloading in Safari, for example), will open. The file is decompressed, and the installer it contains launches presenting a user with the following screen:...

Yesterday we found out some amazing information. In one of Andrea Rossi's question and answer sessions on his blog he was asked some questions to which he gave some startling answers. How many e-cats are in continuous operation today? - 97 How many geographic locations are e-cats running today? - 4 Are there any e-cats running in the US with businesses you own or individuals you trust? - YES So to recap on this, Rossi is saying that at this moment there are 97 e-cats installed and working accross 4 different countries, with some already installed in the businesses of...

The "news" that iPhones and iPads keep track of where you go has been known in forensic circles for some time When British programmers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden took the stage at the Where 2.0 conference to unveil their work on iPhone location tracking, it was clear they had some big news on their hands. The duo outlined what they called "the discovery that your iPhone and 3G iPad [are] regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file." Their findings started a firestorm of media coverage. But as the details came to light, one researcher was...

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics

Kunar Province, Afghanistan – Tactical NAV, a military-grade iPhone app created by U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan J. Springer, a battalion fire support officer with the 101st Airborne Division, has successfully been used in combat to help destroy a Taliban fighting position in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province near the Pakistan border. As troops were patrolling along a main supply route leading to a U.S. base, soldiers in the convoy came under heavy machine-gun fire from an enemy fighting position nearby. While troops were in contact, a call for fire was initiated by the forward observer on the ground, and Tactical NAV...

Michigan researchers have built a prototype of a new auto motor that does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, replacing the old internal combustion engine with a disc-shaped shock wave generator. It could slash the weight of hybrid cars and reduce auto emissions by 90 percent. The generator is about the size of a saucepot, and would replace the 1,000-pound power train in most cars — no transmission, cooling system, emissions regulation or fluids needed. Norbert Müller and colleagues at Michigan State University showed off the new motor prototype at a meeting with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects...

Judge lets Sony spy on Geohot visitors in PS3 suit George Hotz faced another setback in his defense against Sony's anti-jailbreaking lawsuit late Thursday after a judge granted Sony a potentially controversial amount of information access. It now has permission to get the IP addresses, accounts and other details of anyone who has visited either his main Geohot site or his PS3 jailbreak Blogger site between January 2009 and the modern day. Sony made clear that the access wouldn't be limited to those who downloaded the jailbreak code.The company had already received permission to track as much information as possible...

Researchers at Chalmers in Sweden have shown that a surface emitting laser – a cheaper and more energy-efficient type of laser for fiber optics than conventional lasers – can deliver error-free data at a record speed of 40 Gbit/s. The break-through could lead to faster Internet traffic, computers and mobile phones. Today's commercial lasers can send up to 10 Gb of data per second (Gbit/s) through optical fibers. This applies to both conventional lasers and to surface emitting lasers. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have managed to increase the speed of the surface emitting laser four times, and see...

What is it with companies thinking they can get around the Clean Air Act? Earlier this year, the second-largest refinery in the U.S. was fined $5.3 million (and required to upgrade pollution control systems for $700 million) for CAA violations. Before that, companies like Pep Boys, Cummins and Mercedes (among others) were all forced to pay fines for selling products that are just plain dirtier than they should be. Today, the EPA announced that PowerTrain is the latest to be hit with a CAA-violation fine. The company settled the case and will now have to pay $2 million because, between...

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on.

A WHOPPING 77 PER CENT less power is needed for Toshiba's 40nm scale CMOS flip-flop circuit compared to earlier flip-flops, the Japanese company claims.

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends. Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms "Facebook", "Egypt" and "revolution". The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed. As a reality check: the search terms "Egypt", "revolution" and "genital mutilation" turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women...

It's a move that reeks of extreme confidence, bordering on the reckless. Google is so certain its Chrome browser is unhackable it has promised to award £12,500 ($20,000) and a notebook to the first person who proves them wrong. The company laid down the gauntlet ahead of the fifth annual Pwn2Own hacking competition next month.