DARPA Plays Spot the Suicide Bomber

How do you spot a suicide bomber? And even more important, how do you spot a suicide bomber before they get close enough to blow up their target?

To address this problem, DARPA this year started the Human-carried Explosive Detection Stand-off System (HEDSS) program to develop a system that can rapidly identify human carried explosives (HCEs) at ranges from 50 to 150 meters.

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'Field Sense' May Be Teachable

The likes of Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Diego Maradona, besides their athletic ability, have an incredible sense of the players around them, which allowed them to display incredible plays in their respective sports.

Peter Vint is a researcher at the US Olympic Committee, and showed Wired his research on how great players quickly adapt to their environments and how this can be taught to others.

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Ghost Cities Of 2100

For 900 years, Moenjodaro, a city in what is now Pakistan, was the urban hub of a thriving civilization, the New York or London of its day. Around 1700 B.C., residents suddenly abandoned the Indus Valley city, and it was lost in the sands of time until archaeologists began excavating it in the 1920s.

Today, visitors can wander for hundreds of acres among its deserted streets and homes.

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Text messaging could soon be the new way to call for help

Texting on your mobile could soon be the quickest way to call for police help.

The Government has given the go-ahead for a new 999 text-messaging emergency line which will work in tandem with the traditional call centre.

Soon typing in text speak "hlp 5-o sum1 hs brokN n2 my hous" - 'Help police, someone has broken into my house' - should summon an emergency response.


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U.S. general laments Google Earth capability

The head of U.S. Air Force intelligence and surveillance on Thursday said data available commercially through online mapping software such as Google Earth posed a danger to security but could not be rolled back.

"To talk about danger is, if I may, really is irrelevant because it's there," said Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

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Hi-tech tool tracks city graffiti

US cities are battling the problem of vandalism head on with a hi-tech system that analyses and tracks graffiti and its perpetrators.

In the US, cleaning up graffiti is estimated to cost about $10bn (£5bn) per year. Rather than simply obliterate the graffiti, the system keeps a permanent record of it which allows police to compile a database of similar daubings.

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Mapping Traffic Flow

New trafficking software will enable drivers to find the quickest route to their final destination.

Drivers are always searching for the fastest route--whether they are traveling home on a busy Friday afternoon or rushing to the airport for an early-morning flight. Now Tele Atlas, a Boston-based company that provides digital maps and navigational content, has integrated new trafficking software into its map database so that drivers can find the most optimal route based on speed rather than distance--for any stretch of road at any hour of any day of the week.

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New tech may boost indoor mobile coverage

A new technology to boost the indoor coverage of mobile-phone networks — and a possible rival to combined fixed-mobile offerings, such as BT's Fusion — is set to hit the mass market in less than a year, a manufacturer said.

Several companies are developing so-called femtocells, small indoor base stations for third-generation mobile-phone networks, allowing operators to improve indoor coverage at a substantially lower cost than the traditional way of adding more cell towers.

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Lasers for video surveillance

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have built a new optical surveillance based on lasers. Their Laser-Based Item Monitoring System (LBIMS) is designed to protect high-value items in high security environments.

It’s also supposed to respect your privacy and be the equivalent of cameras with a 10,000-megapixel resolution. The LBIMS can be used in situations where conventional surveillance systems cannot be employed, such as areas where video surveillance has been specifically prohibited and areas where a RFID system could trigger an explosion. It should become commercially available this year.

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Faster "slamming" robots

SLAM is an acronym for 'simultaneous localization and mapping,' and slamming robots are simply robots which at the same time build a map of their environment while keeping track of their own localization.

Now, according to New Scientist, Purdue University engineers have designed P-SLAM robots based on a prediction-based SLAM algorithm. This algorithm contains an environmental-structure predictor to predict the structure inside an unexplored region. As these robots make some guesses about their environments, they are able to react faster in unfamiliar buildings. But if this technique is working well in offices — which have some repetitive characteristics from room to room — it is not yet well-adapted to outdoor environments.

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Face recognition next in terror fight

Homeland Security leaders are exploring futuristic and possibly privacy-invading technology aimed at finding terrorists and criminals by using digital surveillance photos that analyze facial characteristics.

The government is paying for some of the most advanced research into controversial face-recognition technology, which converts photos into numerical sequences that can be instantly compared with millions of photos in a database.

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A Chopper Shield

Firing massive Kevlar and steel nets at inbound rocket-propelled grenades could save helicopters in combat.

Last January, a Black Hawk helicopter flying in rural Iraq burst into flames, killing all 13 soldiers on board. A few days later, a helicopter owned by a private security company crashed in Baghdad, killing five civilian contractors. Over the next few weeks, six more aircraft were shot down, leaving 11 more dead—one of the worst series of chopper disasters since the war began.

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First Citywide Sensor Network Planned

A network of sensors to be installed on and powered by city streetlights in Cambridge, Mass., could make urban monitoring easier than a doctor's visit.

After all, a city's health, like a person's, can benefit from regular checkups. But monitoring such physical factors as weather and air quality are typically time-consuming and labor-intensive.

The CitySense project, led by researchers from Harvard University and Cambridge-based BBN Technologies, will disperse about 100 wireless devices to collect weather and air quality information about the city, and will also serve as a research platform for other scientists to experiment with sensor networks.

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