National privacy laws aren’t ready to handle the 10,000 commercial drones predicted to be flying around in US airspace by 2020, nor the surveillance drones that some local police and US law enforcement agencies are using already and that many more are seeking. That’s the conclusion voiced by US Senators and various expert witnesses during a hearing on domestic drone usage this morning.
NASA has announced new agreements with three American commercial companies to design and develop the next generation of U.S. human spaceflight capabilities, enabling a launch of astronauts from U.S. soil in the next five years. Advances made by these companies under newly signed Space Act Agreements through the agency’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative are intended to ultimately lead to the availability of commercial human spaceflight services for government and commercial customers.
In the era of remote-controlled drones, invisible planes and microwave guns, no military innovation should come as a surprise. But among the array of new weapons none are more satisfying than a cannon that allows you to unleash bolts of lightning.
Ben Miller’s drones are some of the latest bots to fly in American skies.
The manager for the drone program at the sheriff’s office in Mesa County, Colo., Miller uses his machines — small enough to fit in the back of an SUV — to track bad guys and rescue lost hikers.
The United States and Iran are locked in a long-running cyber war that appears to be escalating amid a stalemate over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.
The Flame virus that surfaced recently may be part of the face-off, but Washington probably has more sophisticated tools at its disposal, security specialists say.
“Large nations with large spy agencies have been using these kinds of techniques for more than a decade,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow who monitors technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
This summer, Pegasus Global Holdings will begin building a city from scratch in the desert just outside of Hobbs, New Mexico, that will look not unlike Hobbs itself. The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will be modeled on a mid-sized, mid-American town of about 35,000 people. Hobbs, located just outside the Texas border in the Southeastern corner of the state, is just a bit larger than that. The new city—CITE, as the locals and out-of-town developers call it—will similarly have a kind of downtown, a retail district, residential neighborhoods, and collar communities. It will have functioning roads, self-sustaining utilities, and its own communications infrastructure. It will not, however, have a single permanent resident.
I teach entrepreneurship to about 50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach roughly 150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience.
Under the 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stipulates that gasoline and diesel refiners must blend a certain amount of “renewable fuel” into their products or face penalties.
Much to the chagrin of California tourism promoters, smog is likely one of the things you picture when you think about the city of Los Angeles. The haze of pollutants that often hangs over the city is more than just an eyesore; it’s a source of considerable respiratory stress. And where does that air pollution come from? Smokestacks, tailpipes, and cows. You read that right—cows. In fact, a new study estimates that cows contribute at least as much as automobiles.
A top US official has defended as legal and ethical its use of drone strikes to target terrorism suspects.
The officials comments on Monday by White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan was the most direct acknowledgement yet of the clandestine programme.
Non-military agencies have been gearing up to get unmanned drones in the sky across America, and now it looks like those controversial aircraft will soon be heading north, as well.
Not only are surveillance drones expected to soar in droves across American airspace in the not-so-distant future, but now it has been confirmed that authorities in Canada have successfully followed through with test flights of the unmanned aircraft for their own use.
Whether soldiers want to avoid infection during the theoretical zombie apocalypse or just keep clean on modern battlefields, the U.S. Army has their backs. Military researchers have begun sniffing around the idea of specially treated clothing that could not only repel dirt, rain and snow, but also invisible threats from chemicals, bacteria and viruses.
The least expensive way for the Western U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to help prevent the worst consequences of global warming is to replace coal with renewable and other sources of energy that may include nuclear power, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
Battery giants in Japan and Korea have long dominated the world’s battery technology, and still do when it comes to small format batteries for laptops and consumer electronics. But at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E event this week, a dozen or so battery companies and research labs showed off their innovations for batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid, signalling how battery innovation, at least at the prototype level, is alive and well in the U.S. and could even lead the next-generation of transportation and grid tech.
The skies are going to look very different pretty soon, and it’s been a long time coming. Congress finally passed a spending bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, allocating $63.4 billion for modernizing the country’s air traffic control systems and expanding airspace for unmanned planes within three and a half years.
