Passive-Walking Robot Can Stroll Downhill Forever With No Power Source

This robot has only mechanical parts, which have been designed to mimic the lower limbs of a human in both form and function. It has thighs, shins and ankles, and it tips the scale around the weight of an average human. It was designed at Nagoya Institute of Technology’s Sano Lab, which put it through some impressive paces in a walking test — it set a Guinness World Record by walking continuously for 13 hours, taking 100,000 steps and covering 15 kilometers, according to the video news site DigInfo.

This type of forward falling motion is not exactly a new concept — when I was your age, I had a Slinky, too — but it’s an interesting reminder that robotic technology doesn’t necessarily need tons of servos and articulated limbs to accomplish a complex task. Three simple joints are enough to keep the robot moving almost perpetually, as long as it has a slight downward grade on which to walk. There are no computer chips or electronics at all, other than those on the treadmill.

The designers envision deploying the robot’s walking strategy in sporting equipment, according to DigInfo. We can also imagine it doing quite well in games of robotic endurance, in which competitive bots walk a marathon and kick soccer balls around. The design might also someday be used as a prosthetic device or artificial legs. Check it out:

Video: Supercooled Quantum Levitating Hoverboard Lets Students Glide on Air

You probably saw that super viral quantum locking levitation video that bounced all over the Web last week (though technically it’s been around since summer) in which a team of researchers plays with some liquid nitrogen, a small superconducting disc, and some strange quantum phenomenon that makes the disc hover above a magnet, no strings attached. This week’s levitation vid taps a similar phenomenon known as the Meisnner effect to achieve this kind of levitation at a decidedly cooler scale: that of the hoverboard.

MagSurf, build by researchers at Universite Paris Diderot in France, flips the strange world of the quantum into a more sci-fi application, essentially turning a skateboard like platform into one big magnetic superconductor. Using liquid nitrogen, the team turn the platform super-cold, creating an electromagnetic field that is expelled from the inside of the board. It’s not quantum locking--the skateboard is too big to mimic that little super-cooled disc--but it provides enough outward magnetic force to float above a rail of permanent magnets.

It’s sort of like a Maglev train, and sort of not. But, says SmartPlanet, one group of researchers in Japan is reportedly working on scaling exactly this kind of technology into better levitating train tech. That sounds somewhat difficult, given the extremely low temperatures needed to make this kind of thing work. For your enjoyment, the quantum locking video--which is really cool if you haven’t seen it--is below.

[SmartPlanet]

The Top 10 New Species of 2011

Pancake Batfish

View Photo Gallery

This planet is home to some incredibly awesome things, and every year we enjoy hearing about the new creatures that had, until recently, escaped biologists’ attention. Among scientists’ top 10 new species for 2010: A leech with gigantic teeth, a bioluminescent fungus, a mushroom with gills for breathing underwater and a spider that spins material 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

Topping our list of favorites is the “tyrant leech king,” Tyrannobdella rex, measuring just 2 inches in length but with a single jaw and massive teeth. This bloodsucker was found attached to the nasal mucous membrane of a person in Peru, scientists said.

This monster is followed closely by the Louisiana pancake batfish, a flat, gloopy-looking pale creature that lives in the area covered by last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The pale Halieutichthys intermedius bottom-dweller hops awkwardly on its arm-like fins, resembling a walking bat. 

John Sparks, one of the scientists who reported the discovery and who is curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, said: “If we are still finding new species of fishes in the Gulf, imagine how much diversity, especially microdiversity, is out there that we do not know about.”

Here are some other highlights:

• An iron-oxide consuming bacterium that is munching on the RMS Titanic. The Halomonas titanicae bacteria sticks to steel surfaces and creates knobs of corrosion material. Researchers believe it could help dispose of old ships and, incidentally, sunken oil rigs.
• Tiny gel-coated day-glo mushrooms, discovered by biologists at San Francisco State University. The 'shrooms are a wee 8 mm in diameter with caps just 2 centimeters across, and have been named Mycena luxaeterna (eternal light) after a movement in Mozart's “Requiem.” There are an estimated 1.5 million species of fungi on Earth, but only 71 of them are bioluminescent.
• The Darwin’s bark spider, an orb weaver from Madagascar that builds webs big enough to span rivers, streams and lakes. In one instance, a web stretched 82 feet across a river and trapped at least 30 insects, according to a news release from Arizona State University. The spider’s silk is more than twice as strong as any other known spider silk, and 10 times stronger than an equivalent size piece of Kevlar, scientists said.

There are other insects, a fruit-eating lizard, and a cute mini antelope, too. Check out our photo gallery to see all the top 10.

These bizarre creatures are probably only the tip of the iceberg, scientists say. The top 10 list is intended to highlight the importance of ecological preservation and biodiversity, and it was announced today to celebrate the birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, who started the modern system of plant and animal names and classifications.

Scientists' best guess is that all species discovered since 1758 represent less than 20 percent of the plants and animals living on Earth, said Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist who directs the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.

"A reasonable estimate is that 10 million species remain to be described, named, and classified before the diversity and complexity of the biosphere is understood," he said.

Pretty impressive when you think about it. Here we are looking for life on other worlds, but there is so much left undiscovered right here, under our noses. Or inside them, as it were.

[POPSCI]

Gallery: The Top 10 New Species of 2011

Darwin's Bark Spider

(Caerostris darwini)
 The bark spider spins the largest orb-style webs in the world with a silk that is ten times stronger than Kevlar and the strongest biological material known to man. Described exactly 150 years after the first publication of The Origin of Species, this spider was named in honor of Charles Darwin.

 

 

 

 

 

Eternal Light Mushroom

(Mycena luxaeterna)
 One of only 71 known species of bioluminescent fungi, these mushrooms constantly emit a greenish-yellow light from their stems. They were collected near Sao Paolo, Brazil, in some of the last remaining Atlantic forest.

 

 

 

Monitor Lizard

(Varanus bitatawa)
 This lizard is over 6 feet long and weighs around 20 pounds. Though known by local hunters, it had eluded biologists until recently as it is primarily a tree-dweller. It is only found in the Northern Sierra Madre Forest on Luzon Island in the Philippines.

Pollinating Cricket 

(Glomeremus orchidophilus) 

Found on Réunion Island in the Southwestern Indian Ocean, this cricket is the only pollinator of a rare orchid also found on the island. This is the first clear evidence of cricket-mediated pollination in flowering plants.

Duiker

(Philantomba walteri)
 This deerlike mammal was discovered in West Africa at a bushmeat market. It is named Walter's Duiker in honor of Walter Verheyen, who is believed to have collected the first sample of the species in Togo in 1968.

King Tyrant Leech

(Tyrannobdella rex)
 In what was surely an unpleasant moment of discovery, this T. rex leech was found on the nasal mucous membrane of a girl in Peru. The size of its teeth are unusual for a leech with a single armed jaw.

 

 

 

Underwater Mushroom

(Psathyrella aquatica)
 Found in the Rogue River in Oregon, these fungi are the only known species of mushrooms that fruit underwater.

 

 Jumping Cockroach

(Saltoblattella montistabularis)
 This cockroach's legs are specially adapted for jumping, an adaptation which has not been seen since the Jurassic period. Its jumping prowess is akin to that of a grasshopper. The antennae provide an extra point to stabilize it while jumping.

 

 Pancake Batfish

(Halieutichthys intermedius)
 The crown jewel of this list, the Lousiana Pancake Batfish's well-being is unfortunately on tenterhooks thanks to the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill encompasses the batfish's entire known distribution.

Rust-Eating Bacterium 

(Halomonas titanicae)

Found on a rusticle on the sunken Titanic, this bacteria consumes iron oxide. Along with other microorganisms, the bacteria have contributed to the decay of the ship's metal by sticking to the steel and forming mounds of corrosion material. Pictured here: on the left, a negative staining of a bacterium; right, a stack of bacteria forming a stalactite-esque structure.

[ POPSCI]

Intel to Mass-Produce New 3-D Transistors for Faster, More Efficient Computer Chips

3-D Transistor This image shows the vertical fins of Intel’s 22 nanometer microprocessor using 3-D Tri-Gate transistors.

In a move that could remake the microchip industry, Intel announced Wednesday it will start mass-producing the first three-dimensional silicon transistors. The 3-D transistor design, which Intel says will improve efficiency by more than one-third, will be integrated into a 22-nanometer node in an Intel chip called Ivy Bridge.

It’s a major change from the two-dimensional flat transistor structure we all know and love, which has powered every computer chip for the last 50 years. The 3-D switch design and the scale of its production will allow Moore’s Law to advance apace, Intel said.

Moore’s Law holds that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit will double every two years, but this places limits on the circuits’ size — a growing problem as engineers cram greater numbers of transistors onto ever-tinier chips. A 3-D switch could allow computer chips to be built like skyscrapers, optimizing space by building upward, and thereby allowing uninhibited transistor growth.

The Tri-Gate transistors consist of a thin 3-D silicon fin that arises vertically from the silicon substrate, Intel explains. Each fin has three gates, one on the top and one on each side, which allows for greater transistor current control. When it’s on, current flow is more efficient, and when the switches are off, the flow of electrons is closer to zero. By contrast, flat transistors have one gate, only on top. 

All this leads to greater efficiency, allowing chips to operate at a lower voltage and with lower leakage — Intel claims a whopping 37 percent performance increase over its 2-D chips. Since the fins and their gates are vertical, more transistors can be packed close together. Eventually, designers will be able to make taller fins, aiming for even better performance.

“It will give product designers the flexibility to make current devices smarter and wholly new ones possible,” said Mark Bohr, a senior fellow at Intel.

More than 6 million 22-nm Tri-Gate transistors could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence, according to the company. (If you zoom in, who knows how many could fit!)

The new transistors will be integrated into Ivy Bridge-based Intel Core processors by the end of this year, which consumers will be able to get in 2012, Intel said. 

Plenty of other chip designers have been talking about 3-D chips — just last month, we saw a 2-D reprogrammable one designed to behave as if it was a 3-D one. But Intel has taken it a step further by figuring out how to mass-produce them.

It’s technically 3-D because the switches are vertical and horizontal, but the transistors are not stacked, allowing electrons to flow in three dimensions — that’s a holy Grail of microprocessor design. But a new circuit design that allows more transistors on tinier spaces certainly sounds like a major breakthrough.

[IBM via PC Magazine]

Burning Waste From Whisky Production, a Scottish Energy Project Will Power 9,000 Homes

Whisky Pot Stills at the Glendronach Distillery


Regretting having that “one more” scotch last night? This might make you feel a little better: your tipple of choice may soon be providing sustainable energy
 
The project, slated to begin operating in 2013, will be located in Rothes in Speyside, the famed whisky producing region that is home to such recognizable labels as the Famous Grouse, Chivas Regal, and Glenfiddich (all of which will contribute biomass to the plant). The plant will burn a blend of wood chips and draff, the spent grains used in the whisky-making process. Additionally, pot ale--another residual product of the process--will be donated from distilleries and turned into organic fertilizer and animal feed for local farmers.

Of Scotland’s 100 distilleries, 50 are in Speyside and 16 of those will ship their draff to the site, which will burn nothing that comes from more than 25 miles away. That makes this a pretty sustainable and very locally-sourced energy project--it’s even drawn a bit of praise from the local World Wildlife Fund folks. And it’s a model that could feasibly be replicated across other regions if successful.

This is not Scotland’s first foray into whiskey-fueled energy projects, but it is the first that will provide power to a public utility. Scotland’s largest distillery, Fife, has nearly completed its own on-site bioenergy plant that will feed energy back into the distillery. And researchers at Scotland’s Napier University last year announced that they had devised a means to turn scotch-making residuals like pot ale and draff into biofuels that could burn in ordinary automobile engines.

So raise a glass, for your scotch habit is now contributing to the renewable energy revolution.

[Guardian]

Undergraduate Designer Makes Nanostructured Clothes That Block Poisonous Gases

Gas-Trapping Gear Cornell student Allie Thielens, left, models the gas-absorbing hood and mask designed by fellow student Jennifer Keane, right. Mark Vorreuter, Cornell University

 

A new type of cloth can guard against noxious gases and odors by trapping their molecules inside its fibers, according to Cornell University. A Cornell undergrad fashioned the cloth into protective head gear, seen here in a summery shade of turquoise.

The cloth is made of cellulose fibers and metal-organic framework molecules, crystalline compounds that form a porous structure. The pores can trap and store molecules of gas, serving as wearable filtration systems.

Metal-organic frameworks are often studied for their ability to store beneficial gases, like hydrogen for a fuel cell, for instance. There are several ways to build MOFs, including the use of petroleum-derived chemicals and even edible compounds. But they usually come in a powdered form that is sensitive to air exposure, making them difficult to weave into a garment.

Marcia Da Silva Pinto, a postdoctoral researcher in fiber science, and assistant fiber science professor Juan Hinestroza spent months figuring out how to bind the MOFs and cellulose fiber together. Now the researchers are able to make large surfaces of fabric coated with the MOFs, and hope to make integrated nanofibers next, Hinestroza said. 

The fabrics would be tailored to fit a specific compound by designing pore sizes that correspond to the molecular size of the gas.

Jennifer Keane, a fiber science and apparel design major, worked with Da Silva Pinto and Hinestroza to make a gas-absorbing hood and mask. The project received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

 [Cornell News via MedGadget]

Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves

This is a Teleportation Device The setup Noriyuki Lee and colleagues used to teleport quantum light.Science/AAAS

 

In a real-life use of Schrödinger's theoretical paradoxical cat, researchers report that they were able to quickly transfer a complex set of quantum information while preserving its integrity. The information, in the form of light, was manipulated in such a way that it existed in two states at the same time, and it was destroyed in one spot and recreated in another. The new breakthrough is a major step toward building safe, effective quantum computers. 

No felines were harmed in the making of this experiment, which actually studied wave packets of light that existed in a state of quantum superposition, meaning they existed in two different phases simultaneously. This phenomenon is described in Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics thought experiment, in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive, depending on the state of a subatomic particle.

In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost. 

The team employed a mind-boggling set of quantum manipulation techniques to achieve this, including squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection. The photo above depicts their device, nicknamed the Teleporter, in the lab of Akira Furusawa at the University of Tokyo. 

The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.
“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said. 

Optics researcher Philippe Grangier at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, said it was a major breakthrough.

“It shows that the controlled manipulation of quantum objects has progressed steadily and achieved objectives that seemed impossible just a few years ago,” he wrote in an editorial that accompanies the study.

[Science]

 

Now In Production: Human Skin Grown In a Robot-Controlled German Skin Factory

Skin Scaffold A matrix with a vascular system, or BioVaSc (biological vascularized scaffold), on which skin cells can be cultivated at the Fraunhofer skin factory.

The skin factory concept at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology, where scientists hoped to mass-produce skin at low cost for clinical testing and other uses. Now it’s come online, with robots squeezing pink solution into pipettes and turning out sheets of human flesh.

The factory can produce 5,000 penny-sized discs of whitish translucent tissue every month. The designers say it can also come in shades of brown. Each disc will cost about $72, a bit more than expected when the project was in its planning stages two years ago. The German newspaper Der Spiegel took a tour of the facility with its director, Heike Walles; check out their coverage here.

Robots and computers control the skin-making process, which takes place in a sterile, climate-controlled setting. The skin broth is closely monitored for any signs of infection and computers guide the lasers and blades that cut swatches of skin. The goal is to pave the way for factory-produced human tissue, complete with blood vessels, that could be used to treat injuries or various medical conditions.

As Der Spiegel puts it, Walles believes factories like this one will be the only way to efficiently produce new tissue like bladders, tracheas, cartilage and even human organs. She and others have successfully produced engineered tissue for human transplantation, but the process is hugely expensive and labor-intensive. An automated manufacturing facility could make it cheaper and simpler, she says.

For now, the tissue is being used in animal testing and could even be used for products like cosmetics, but it is still a long way from being transplanted. European Union regulations require several stages of animal testing before it could be used in a clinical setting, Der Spiegel reports.

[Der Spiegel]

Reprogrammable Chips Could Allow You to Update Your Hardware Just Like Software

The rapid pace of innovation and the relentless pressure of Moore’s Law means new and better gadgets are always coming to market, but it also means whatever you just bought for several hundred (or thousand) dollars will likely be obsolete in a matter of months (see: the iPhone through the iPhone 4). But a new kind of shape-shifting chip--if it can be tamed and perfected--could change all that, allowing device hardware to be reconfigured when updated designs become available.

Essentially, startup Tabula is trying to create the hardware equivalent of software--a chip that can be updated over time to implement hardware improvements without scrapping a device outright. If such programmable chips could be made fast, and more importantly cheap, devices with reprogrammable components could supplant the fixed hardware devices ubiquitous today.

Reprogrammable chips aren’t completely novel. An existing type of chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is currently used in some finished devices and in many prototypes before production begins (chips are cheapest when you press a million or more, so FPGAs make good stand-ins for prototypes). But FPGAs are inherently large because they need space for all that reprogrammable circuitry. In turn, that makes them both slow and expensive.

Tabula’s chips enjoy several advantages over FPGAs, the company says. To solve the size problem, the chips are cleverly designed to mimic the way a stacked, 3-D chip might function. The company likens it to stepping into an elevator that doesn’t move up or down. If when the doors close the floor outside is quickly rearranged to look like a different floor, when the doors open a person inside the elevator would think he or she has traveled to a different floor. This also improves speed, because the person doesn’t actually have to actually travel anywhere.

Tabula’s chips are capable of reconfiguring themselves in eight different ways at a rate of 1.6 gigahertz (that’s 1.6 billion times per second). That essentially means a single chip can function like an eight-layer 3-D chip, fooling data into thinking it has hopped to a completely new layer of the chip.

That capability, along with the advantage of being updatable, could spell big changes for the computer and electronic device industries. But stumbling blocks remain: Reconfigurable chips suck a lot of power, and there’s still that cost thing to overcome. But it's worth noting that Tabula just received $108 million in funding, the largest round of investment acquired by a chipmaker in a decade, so at least a few in-the-know investors think the company can iron out the wrinkles and drive down the cost. If it means not having to buy a new smartphone every year to stay on the bleeding edge of technology, a small premium up front might be worth it.

[Technology Review]

Tapping Light's Magnetic Properties, Innovative Tech Harvests Solar Energy Without Solar Cells

One of the major barriers between solar energy and solar-derived electricity is solar cells themselves--commercial solar cells aren’t very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, but they are the best thing we’ve got. Now, a team of University of Michigan researchers have potentially devised a better way to convert solar energy into electricity: get rid of the semiconductor-based solar cells altogether and tap into the magnetic effects of light.

The researcher say the’ve essentially found a way to make an “optical battery” by extracting a very strong magnetic field from light, which generally exhibits weak magnetic effects. Those effects are generally so weak that until now scientists ignored them altogether. But the Michigan team found that by running light through a non-conductive material at the right intensity, the light field can generate magnetic effects 100 million times stronger than previously thought.

That’s more than a few orders of magnitude, and plenty to make those once-negligible magnetic effects quite interesting from an energy standpoint. By focusing this magnetic field on a material, it can be used to separate the positive and negative charges within the material, setting up a voltage. The discovery could lead to a new kind of solar cell that dispenses with semiconductors, instead relying on cheap and abundant glass for most of the components. 

The technique is not perfect. To work, the sunlight must be focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter. That’s pretty intense--way more intense than natural sunlight--but the researchers are looking for other materials that could work at lower intensities. With better materials--and the researchers think they are out there--the technique could achieve 10 percent efficiency: on par with today’s commercial semiconductor cells, minus the costly semiconductors.


 [University of Michigan]

Police and Firefighters in the U.S. Get a Tiny, Throwable Recon Robot

 


U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been making use of a tiny, tossable robot for recon and observation for several years, and now--thanks to a decision handed down by the FCC--law enforcement and firefighters can deploy the hardy little ‘bot, known as the Recon Scout Throwbot.

You read that correctly: a potentially life-saving tool that’s earned broad approval by service members serving in some of the toughest regions in the world was previously denied to first responders and law enforcement stateside because the robot couldn’t get a waiver to operate in a certain block of spectrum needed to transmit its live video feed. We’ll save you the rant about a bloated and slow-moving bureaucracy. Suffice it to say, Throwbot now has its waiver and is ready to recon.

And recon it can. At just 1.2 pounds and eight inches long, the camera-equipped rolling robot can be quite literally tossed like a football onto rooftops or through building windows. Its design ensures it lands upright in pretty much any situation where it hits a flat surface, and once deployed it can stealthily move under furniture, cars, or other cover and beam back live video to a command station 1,000 feet away. It is designed to be controlled by an operator working alongside it via a simple joystick control that also sports a small display that provides a ‘bots’-eye view.

Such a small, durable, and easily deployable robot with video streaming capability has so many potential (and critical) uses that it’s mind-numbing to think that it took this long for something like broadcast spectrum to get approved. See Throwbot get thrown in the video below.

New Graphene Material is Paper-Thin and Ten Times Stronger Than Steel

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a new material that is lighter, less dense, harder, and stronger than steel. But this material isn’t one of those breakthroughs that only sounds good on paper. It is paper, and it could be a game-changer for materials science if it can live up to researchers’ hopes.
This graphene paper is constructed of graphite reformed by chemical processes into monolayer hexagonal carbon lattices stacked as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is remarkably strong. 


Compared to steel, the prepared GP is six times lighter, five to six times lower density, two times harder with 10 times higher tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

That’s no incremental improvement on the qualities of steel, but a huge leap forward in terms of overall material strength (plus, like paper, it is flexible). And because it is graphene, it is also imbued with some interesting electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties.

But perhaps best of all, graphene paper not outrageously difficult or expensive to manufacture, and as such it could have huge implications for the aviation and automotive industries, where manufacturers have already been turning to composites and carbon fiber materials to cut weight and thus increase fuel economies.

[UTS]

Self-Correcting Laser Rifle

Rifle Sighting System A new rifle sighting system precisely measures the deflection of the barrel relative to the sight and then electronically makes corrections. Ron Walli/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

When you’re aiming at a target two miles away, the slightest perturbation could end up causing a catastrophic miss — not good enough for today’s military. Until guns can aim themselves, snipers need the most accurate weapons possible. Engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory came up with a laser-guided correction system that ensures a shooter’s crosshairs are always on the mark.

The new Reticle Compensating Rifle Barrel Reference Sensor measures slight disruptions in a gun barrel, automatically compensating for how they would impact a bullet’s trajectory and adjusting the gun’s crosshairs accordingly. This hyper-accuracy can enable snipers to take full advantage of modern guns with huge ranges up to two miles, ORNL explains.

It works by measuring slight variations across a rifle barrel. High-caliber rifles usually have a series of grooves on the exterior, called flutes, which help reduce weight and dissipate heat, allowing the barrel to cool off more quickly after firing a round. ORNL researchers led by Slobodan Rajic added glass optical fibers to these grooves. Laser diodes send a beam of light into the optical fibers, which split it in two directions, along the top and side of the barrel.

Using these beams and other sensor inputs, algorithms calculate how accurately a gun’s sights — the reticle — correlates to the barrel’s actual position. The shooter has crosshairs that automatically adjust for environmental conditions in real time, ONRL says.

The system’s resolution is 250 times better than traditional reticles, shifting by 1/1,000th of a minute of angle.

To accompany the accurate crosshairs, Rajic and colleagues are also developing a laser-based bullet tracking system, which would provide a marksman with information about the bullet’s flight path. That sounds kind of like Darpa’s One Shot self-aiming system, which will calculate ballistics and ensure a perfect shot regardless of wind, humidity and other conditions.

The reticle system is targeted for military and police forces, according to ORNL.

 [via Engadget]