For the Iraq war, the Pentagon has left two U.S. companies free to sell their images to all comers -- except representatives from countries blacklisted by the State Department.
The United States is compiling digital dossiers of the irises, fingerprints, faces and voices of terrorism suspects and using the information to track their movements and screen foreigners trying to enter the country.
For scientists who study it, nanotechnology is considered a clean technology - perhaps even the key to solving some current environmental ills. And the field is advancing rapidly.
The military is testing software robots that can identify targets and present them to commanders much more quickly than a human could. The software, known as the Control of Agent-Based Systems or CoABS, uses artificially intelligent "agents" to sift through troves of images and intelligence data to find viable targets.