The United States wants its own starship troopers. As part of a project that's been quietly ticking away for months now, the Department of Defense has decided it needs to grant superhuman powers to its soldiers; providing them with the ability run faster, carry more gear and leap tall buildings. It plans to do this with powered combat armour exoskeletons, and the first contract in the project was awarded this week.
Plans are seemingly well underway to provide a combat-capable, unmanned aircraft for the US Navy. The machine is likely to be used as cannon fodder in the early days of an air war, or as an economical way of beefing up the striking power of manned missions.
Thought-controlled appliances have been a stalwart ingredient of science fiction stories for decades, but inside a laboratory at the University of Rochester, people are communicating their mental musical wishes to a stereo without a remote control (or genie) in sight. There's also a chance that in a future emergency you'll be able to stop your car as soon as you think about it, rather than having to transfer your feet between pedals. It all sounds like a gimmick for the couch potato, but the true beneficiaries of such technology will be the disabled.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama is hard at work developing gigantic 'light sails' that can harness the gentle winds of solar radiation and drag an accompanying craft beyond the reaches of our solar system. Recent advances in materials and, most importantly, a shift in attitude, could see an old science fiction dream become a reality by the end of this decade.
Mechanical engineers at Vanderbilt University are working with DARPA to develop tiny robotic spies.
The latest 'Handbook of Industrial Robotics' reports that the population of robots has doubled over the last decade.