If a country fires an airborne nuclear missile, the source of the attack is obvious. But what about the more fluid threat that hangs over the 21st century—terrorists sneaking a nuclear device into a city and setting it off? In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, researchers suggest that even in the charred aftermath of a nuclear explosion, there could be evidence left behind that helps to identify the source of the bomb.

Physicist Albert Fahey and company went back to the beginning of the atomic age, to the United States’ first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in July 1945. As that bomb test was called “Trinity,” the glass left behind by the blast is called “trinitite.” Fahey obtained some of that glass to show that all these years later, it still contained evidence of the bomb’s makeup.

“Prior to this study, people didn’t realise that other components of the bomb could be discerned from looking at ground debris and seeing what’s associated [with it],” said Dr Fahey. “But there are some distinctive signatures that were in the bomb other than fission products and plutonium, and that gives you hope that you can get some additional information out of it – like where it was made.” [BBC News]

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After decades of development, Iran’s first nuclear power plant is close to operational. This week the country’s TV service announced that engineers have begun loading the fuel rods into the core of the Bushehr plant in southern Iran.

The 1,000-megawatt Bushehr plant has been under construction since before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was first contracted to a company that later became German industrial giant Siemens; more recently work was done with the help of Russia’s state-owned atomic energy company. [Los Angeles Times]

The plant’s 1000-megawatt capacity is comparable to the power put out by many of the nuclear plants scattered across the United States.

Iran‘s power plant was reportedly one target of the Stuxnet computer virus that emerged several weeks ago, but apparently that didn’t impair the final steps of preparing Bushehr.

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The US Missile Defense Agency’s flying laser failed to shoot down a test missile last week. Though in February the same plane successfully destroyed one from 50 miles away, last week’s test at a weapons range off California’s coast was meant to show the Airborne Laser Testbed‘s (ALTB) ability to hit missiles at a 100-mile range.

The laser and jumbo jet combo successfully tracked the missile and hit it, but stopped short of complete destruction, reports AOL News, which broke the story. The agency had not announced the test, which it had rescheduled several times.

“Program officials will conduct an extensive investigation to determine the cause of the failure to destroy the target missile,” the agency said in an e-mailed statement…. [The test], which was designed to demonstrate the weapon’s capability at ranges twice the distance of the initial test, had been delayed at least four times due to various glitches, including problems with the target missile. At one point, the test was scheduled to take place at the opening of a major missile defense conference in Huntsville, Ala., but was delayed due to a software glitch. [AOL News]

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“This is probably going to wind up being the first salvo in a pretty significant debate.” That’s what political scientist Cullen Hendrix told New Scientist in November of last year, when a study came out proclaiming the climate change would spur an uptick in civil wars in Africa. He was correct. This week, another study that will be published (in press) in the same journal—Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—says there is no proof to back up such a connection.

The argument for a link between global warming and war came from UC-Berkeley economist Marshall Burke, who said that food shortages and drought brought on by climate change could cause 50 percent more armed conflict by 2030 under the scenarios that climate models predict. However, Norwegian political scientist Halvard Buhaug looked at sub-Saharan civil war over the last half century for this week’s study. When he compared the records of military conflict with the records of temperature and rainfall, did not see a correlation between the two.

[Buhaug] found that that there was a strong correlation between civil wars and traditional factors, such as economic disparity, ethnic tensions, and historic political and economic instability. [BBC News]

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For two years, the Chinese science satellite SJ-06F flew solo orbits around the Earth (or, as solo as a machine could be in the expanding haze of space junk in orbit). But now it has a partner: Last month China executed the delicate maneuver of aligning another satellite launched this year, SJ-12, with its older counterpart.

Only the United States had executed such a satellite rendezvous before this, and it shows off China’s advancement in satellite sophistication. Three years ago the country blew one of its satellites to smithereens in a practice test—a test that created thousands of additional chunks of debris in orbit. The satellite meet-up is a more elegant trick, and one whose implications could be sinister or benign. Let’s explore both possibilities.

Don’t Worry

China’s game of catch-up, which has its space program closing in on America’s abilities in orbit, strikes fear into the hearts of some politicos. But malfeasance need not be the aim of the satellite maneuver.

“This set of skills serves a whole lot of purposes,” says Dean Cheng, a Chinese policy expert with the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. The most immediate application, Cheng says, may be testing sensors and control systems to help pave the way for docking procedures to be used with China’s first space station module, Tiangong-1, which is set to launch in 2011. “This sort of thing may very well be consistent with wanting to test drive the hardware and software before you test it on your space laboratory,” Cheng says. [New Scientist]

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It’s official: a full-body security scanner can theoretically store your blurry nude picture. After a Freedom of Information Act request from the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, the U.S. Marshals Service released 100 of 35,314 stored images taken by a scanner at an Orlando, Florida, courthouse. Though airport security scanners use similar radio wave technology to get a hazy peek under your clothes, whether these scanners can store your image still seems unclear.

Publications such as CNET question if these images mean a change in federal officials’ statement that the scanners cannot store images:

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.” [CNET]

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Unmanned aerial vehicles beware: We’ve got laser weapons.

This week defense contractor Raytheon debuted video of a test conducted with the U.S. Navy in California this May, in which the company’s laser weapon shot down four UAVs. The shaky black-and-white footage shows lasers locked on an aircraft until it loses control and plunges into the sea.

The Navy’s laser depends upon a guidance system it already uses on its ships—Raytheon’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System, which normally uses radar to guide a 20mm Gatling gun.

Raytheon developed the system after buying six off-the-shelf commercial lasers from the car industry and joining them to make a single, powerful beam guided by the Phalanx’s radars. Unlike other tests which have been conducted on aircraft it uses a solid state laser rather than a chemical generated beam [The Telegraph].

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Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven days straight. Zephyr’s developer, the defense company QinetiQ, hopes the plane can stay aloft and double its own record for a total of fourteen days.

With a 74-foot wingspan, this latest version of the  Zephyr is fifty percent bigger than its predecessors. Its designers hope that the plane will one day find use both for military reconnaissance and also for scientific research. Without a payload, it weights about 110 pounds. Says project manager Jon Saltmarsh:

“Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft.’… The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth,” said Mr Saltmarsh. “We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky.” [BBC]

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The next generation of spies from on high continue to emerge, with two secretive unmanned planes making their public debuts this week.

Boeing Phantom Eye

Engadget calls it a “bowling pin with wings.” I’d say it’s more like a flying maraca.

The Phantom Eye, which Boeing unveiled this week, will take to the skies next year on the power of hydrogen. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) should be able to cruise at an altitude of 65,000 feet.

But the propeller-driven Phantom Eye is no muscle plane. It’ll have a pair of 150-horsepower, 2.3-liter, four-cylinder engines. Boeing says the UAV, with a 150-foot wingspan, will be able to cruise at about 150 knots [172 miles per hour] and carry a payload of up to 450 pounds [CNET].

The plane won’t need to carry much weight, though, because it’s intend to spy, not attack. Boeing says the Phantom Eye will be able to stay aloft for four consecutive days, executing “persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” Its size and breezy pace mean it’s built for endurance and not stealth. But that might not be true for Boeing’s other UAV project, the menacing Phantom Ray that will make a test flight in December.

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“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” American revolutionaries supposedly yelled at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Legend has it that the rebels were trying to conserve ammunition, given the inaccuracy of their 18th century guns.

But things have come a long way since 1775. With DARPA‘s new “One Shot” sniper system [PDF], scheduled to be in soldier’s hands by the fall of 2011, the U.S. military will give snipers the ability to take out an enemy at a distance of .7 miles in winds around 10 to 20 miles per hour. Military brass hopes the system will give snipers a perfect shot at least six times out of ten.

The One Shot system still wouldn’t come close to matching the record for shooting accuracy: In November of last year, British Army sniper Corporal Craig Harrison made two shots at a distance of 1.53  miles in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. But Harrison modestly thanked perfect shooting conditions: no wind, great visibility, and mild weather. The DARPA program aims to give soldiers the technology to hit a target despite adverse conditions.

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You can’t slip much past dedicated amateur astronomers. A month after the United States Air Force launched its space plane, the X-37B, under a veil of secrecy, backyard sky-watchers say they’ve found it, along with clues to its mission.

Though the military still won’t open up about what the classified X-37B actually is, officers have been insistent about what it isn’t: a space weapon. Indeed, defense experts have guessed recently that the craft is testing next-generation spy satellite tech, and the observations back that up.

The amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.” In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky [The New York Times].

In addition, the plane’s path would carry it over places the U.S. is interested in watching, like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, according to Greg Roberts, one of the astronomers to track the X-37B. More than uncovering its secret mission, he was interested in finding the plane because it was difficult. Said Roberts:

“If the data were freely available, we would probably not have bothered with it. I see little sense in tracking objects for which data is freely available. It’s like reinventing the wheel. So as long as there are missions with little or no information, I personally will be interested in the challenge of finding them” [MSNBC].

For more about the Air Force in space, check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy.

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Image: U.S. Air Force

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s Iron Man 2, and it opens today.

Like a lot of summer blockbusters, this sequel stretches the laws of physics and the capabilities of modern technology. But, admirably, a lot of the tech in Iron Man 2 is grounded in fact.

Spoiler Alert! Read on at your own risk.

Palladium and particle colliders

Being Iron Man is killing Tony Stark. As this sequel begins, the palladium core that powers the suit and keeps Stark alive is raising toxicity levels in his bloodstream to alarming highs. It’s not hard to see why Iron Man would try palladium—the now-infamous cold fusion experiments that created a storm of hype in 1989 relied on the metal. And it’s true that palladium does have some toxicity, though it’s been used in alloys for dentistry and jewelry-making.

Having exhausted the known elements in the search for a better power source, Stark, ever the DIY enthusiast, builds a particle collider in his workshop. This is actually not crazy: Physicist Todd Satogata of Brookhaven National Lab says you can build tiny particle colliders; even whiz-kid teenagers do it.

Powering the accelerator, however, might be an issue. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven’s superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of power—enough for 10,000 or 15,000 homes. “For Stark to run his accelerator, he’s gotta make a deal with his power company or he’s gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,” Satogata says [Popular Mechanics].

In addition, Stark doesn’t appear to have the magnets needed to focus a beam as tightly as he does in the film, where it shreds his shop before he gets it focused in the right place. And, as we covered with the recent discovery of element 117, the ultra-heavy lab-created elements that Stark  could have created in his accelerator don’t last long. However, back in 1994 when only 106 elements dotted the periodic table, DISCOVER discussed the idea some physicists have of an “island of stability” where elements we’ve yet to discover/create might be able to exist in a stable way. Perhaps Tony found it.

The guts of the suit

After a long quest, the U.S. military gets its hands on Stark’s most magnificent piece of technology, the Iron Man suit. What they saw when they looked inside was the work of special effect wiz Clark Schaffer.

The silvery suit, originally seen in the first “Iron Man,” is shown again in the new movie in an “autopsy” scene in which the government begins tearing it apart to see how it works. “[The filmmakers] wanted it to look like what you see under the skin of a jet,” said Schaffer, who, along with friend and modeler Randy Cooper, worked on the suit in Los Angeles for six weeks. “There’s an aesthetic to it. I try to make it look as functional and practical as possible but also something that has beauty to it. That was my baby” [Salt Lake Tribune].

But how might the Iron Man suit be able to stand up to the punishment Stark continually receives? Tech News Daily proposes that he took advantage of something scientists are developing now: carbon nanotube foam with great cushioning power.

Plasma weaponry

Iron Man’s nemesis in this second installment is Ivan Vanko, played by the villainous and murky Mickey Rourke, who you might have seen in previews stalking around a racetrack with seemingly electrified prostheses attached to his arms. The explanation in the film is hand-waved a bit, but it seems Vanko’s weapons rely on plasma.

Scientists actually are developing weapons based on plasma, such as the StunStrike, which essentially fires a bolt of lightning, creating an electrical charge through a stream of plasma. Researchers have recently even created what appears to be ball lightning in microwave ovens, which Iron Man’s “repulsor blasts” resemble [Tech News Daily].

Drones and hacking

Vanko isn’t happy with just amazing plasma tentacles, though. Working for Stark’s rival military-industrialist Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), he develops a horde of ghastly humanoid drones for each branch of the military. That, of course, is straight out of science fact—our military relies increasing on robots, be they unmanned aerial vehicles, bots on the ground that investigate roadside bombs, or even unmanned subs currently under development.

He’s a hacker, too, seizing control of an Iron Man suit worn by Don Cheadle as Stark sidekick James Rhodes. As DISCOVER covered in December, that’s a real-life worry, too. Hackers figured out how to steal the video feeds from our Predator drones because of an encryption lapse at one step in the process.

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Bad Astronomy: Iron Man = Win

It was a big week for experimental military aircraft, with the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane and the Navy’s biofuel-powered “Green Hornet” both achieving successful test flights. But the most ambitious—the HTV-2 hypersonic glider under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—lost contact with its operators during its run.

Launched from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. on April 22, the unmanned HTV-2 was planned to cross the Pacific and impact the ocean north of Kwajalein Atoll in the first of two flights to demonstrate technology for a prompt global strike weapon [Aviation Week]. It successfully achieved separation from its booster rocket high in the atmosphere; however, nine minutes into the test the glider lost communication. Now the military is studying the test flight telemetry to figure out where the HTV-2 would have crashed down.

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When it comes to keeping secrets, the U.S. Air Force knows how to stay mum. On Thursday, the Air Force will launch its secret space plane, the unmanned X-37B aircraft, from Cape Canaveral. The project has been a decade in the works and cost millions of dollars to develop–but we civilians have little idea what it’s for.

Once launched via an Atlas V rocket, the plane is expected to spend days or weeks orbiting Earth and performing classified experiments before landing back in California. If successful, the launch will fulfill the Defense Department’s long-time dream: the orbital flight of a military vehicle that combines an airplane’s agility with a spacecraft’s capacity to travel in orbit at 5 miles per second [Popular Mechanics].

The project itself has had an interesting past. It was begun by NASA in 1999 but was later adopted by the Defense Department, and was first placed under the auspices of DARPA before finally finding a home with the Air Force. The Air Force immediately threw the X-37B behind a veil of secrecy, leading some experts to speculate that this could be the military’s attempt to weaponize the final frontier. There are also concerns that the mysterious project could set off an orbital arms race with countries like China.

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The F/A-18 Super Hornet burns through more fuel than any other aircraft in the United States Navy, whose pilots have flown more than 400 of the jets. But with the week of Earth Day upon us, the Navy is trying to use the jet to show it can mend its fuel-guzzling ways. Tomorrow the “Green Hornet,” an F/A-18 running on a half-petroleum, half-biofuel blend, will make a test flight from Maryland.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has set a target that half of naval energy consumption will come from alternative sources by 2020. A “Great Green Fleet,” to sail by 2016, will include nuclear ships, as well as surface combatants with hybrid electric power systems using biofuel and biofuel-powered aircraft [National Geographic]. Before we can talk about ambitious deployment targets, however, the Navy has to prove that its “green” fighter has got what it takes, and so the experimental F/A-18 will try to break the sound barrier.

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