Engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce is a partner in the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s ‘Silent Aircraft’ Initiative. This is a unique three-year project, bringing together researchers from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with industrial partners, to produce the novel design for a passenger aircraft that will be radically quieter than today’s airplanes.

They may not look cool, but knife-resistant kid’s sweatshirts and coats are the latest products aimed at providing parental peace of mind in a Japan horrified by a series of gruesome attacks on children.

One screen, two thumbs. Jackito is the first PDA screen that is 100% Fingertouch-sensitive. While holding Jackito in your hands, you can easily move both your thumbs, either
separately or together. This lets you operate the Touchscreen as fast as your brain thinks.

Would you eat food cooked in your own urine? Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

The United States military has become increasingly reliant on digital images from drones and satellites to give soldiers a sense of the battlefield. Law enforcement officers routinely use digital cameras to photograph crime scenes. Newspapers and magazines are now dependent on digital photographs that can be easily doctored.

A few months ago, an air scrubber in an Intel Corp. chip plant failed, shutting down operations while it was fixed. A sensor in the machine could have predicted the failure, but it had been several weeks since an engineer with a handheld device had checked that sensor on his quarterly rounds of about 4,000 […]

Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA’s ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these ’rogue’ waves and are now being used to study their origins.

Can doping athletes be stopped? With the Athens Olympics about to open, scientists are increasingly concerned that sophisticated techniques for evading drug tests will make it difficult for testers to catch athletes using steroids and other drugs, especially at future athletic competitions when genetic-based enhancements are expected to be prevalent.