Robots.net reviews The Pentagon’s latest unmanned drone program – heading underwater with robots named SHARKs (Submarine Hold At RisK):

The robot is designed for Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting (DASH), which is DOD acronym-speak for a distributed active sonar system which can track hard to detect silent submarines. The SHARK is built from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts to help reduce [...]

Wired reveals the weird ways nanotechnologists are making sound behave like light… this time, by creating a Star Trek weapon in the lab:

Because laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” these new contraptions – which exploit particles of sound called phonons – should properly be called phasers. Such devices could one day be [...]

San Antonio Express-News finds the greatest way to spend a weekend, figuring out what went wrong in the worst explosion in history:

Most historians and scientists have always subscribed to the static electricity theory, but no one ever had shown scientifically how it could have occurred on what was the Hindenburg’s 63rd flight. Until now.

Last fall, a British television [...]

Great idea, if it works. Laboratory Equipment looks at the possibility of slicing up plastic trash to use as “ink” for 3D printers:

Using free software downloaded from sites like Thingiverse, which now holds over 54,000 open-source designs, 3D printers make all manner of objects by laying down thin layers of plastic in a specific pattern. While high-end printers [...]

Grist gives hope for affordable renewable energy from the engineers who’ve discovered that cones can make solar power cheaper than coal:

The company is called V3Solar (formerly Solarphasec) and its product, the Spin Cell, ingeniously solves two big problems facing solar PV.

…

The conical shape catches the sun over the course of its entire arc through the sky, [...]

The Slashgear blog reveals DARPA’s new plan to convert decent, respectable fighter jets into pew-pew videogame laser gunships:

One of the laser projects is called the High Energy Liquid Laser Defense System (HELLADS) and the other is the Aero-Adaptive/Aero-Optic Beam Control (ABC). HELLADS … centers on a 150-kilowatt system.

…

The HELLADS laser system is small enough to be used on [...]

Miami-raised poet and engineer Richard Blanco was selected to write a poem for today’s presidential inauguration.

It begins and ends with the sky.

Here’s what he read:

One Today
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One [...]

It’s a robot exoskeleton, Aliens-style. And it really works.

A caisson is a machine for working under water.

Meyers Konversations-Lexikon is a German encyclopedia.

Rise, German engineers. Rise.

Dive, German engineers. Dive.

Image found at Wikimedia Commons.