A team of scientists from the U.S. and China announced that they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, an advance the military is interested in for treating post-traumatic stress disorder and possibly creating an 'amnesia ray' weapon.

The U.S. Army is mounting Joint Silent Guardian non-lethal, directed energy weapons -- a derivative of the active denial system or "Pain Ray"  -- on Ford 550 commercial trucks for crowd control. A lot is still undecided about how the small fleet of vehicle/weapon combinations will be used including whether they will go to urban areas of Iraq, officials say.

The Senate has embraced last year's Defense Science Board conclusion that directed-energy weapons -- such as high-, medium- and low-power lasers -- hold great potential and should be developed as soon as possible.

An airborne laser weapon dubbed the "long-range blowtorch" has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF).

A recently declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals outlandish plans for "ray gun" devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people's heads.

The Air Force is surveying industry for high-power microwave (HPM) technologies that could be incorporated into unmanned aerial vehicles, bombs and cruise missiles.

John Arquilla reviews the current defense budget, with a focus on the spending for high-tech, and non-lethal weaponry such as the "Active Denial System."

A laser developed for military use is a few steps away from hitting a power threshold thought necessary to turn it into a battlefield weapon. The Solid State Heat Capacity Laser (SSHCL) has achieved 67 kilowatts (kW) of average power in the laboratory.

Two weeks from now, military leaders will convene in London to discuss the pain beam and the next generation of directed-energy weapons, including microwaves and lasers. One motivator for this discussion is the U.S. military's plan to deploy the Active Denial System, or pain -causing directed energy weapon.

The Defense Department is ready to deploy its Active Denial System, its version of a non-lethal stun gun based on gyrotron energy beam technology.