sandia

Incoming! Self-guiding bullet could strike from a mile away

A new design for a self-guiding bullet could allow sharpshooters to accurately fire at targets a full mile away.

The bullet, which is still in a prototype phase, is the brainchild of Sandia National Laboratories researchers Red Jones and Brian Kast. It is designed with built-in actuators and tiny fins that should allow it to rapidly adjust its path in flight.

Designed with the military, law enforcement, and recreational shooters as potential customers, the bullet is four inches long and has an optical sensor embedded in its nose for the detection of a laser on its target, Sandia said in … Read more

Sandia Labs: SOPA will 'negatively impact' U.S. cybersecurity

Add the Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, to the list of opponents of a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill.

Leonard Napolitano, Sandia's director of computer sciences and information systems, warned in a letter that the legislation is "unlikely to be effective" and will "negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality."

Napolitano sent a letter in response to a request for a critique of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, from Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who represents the heart of Silicon Valley. Lofgren is leading opposition … Read more

Fanless heat sink design promises cooler, quieter CPUs

As a product category, CPU cooling hardware tends to offer few worthwhile developments, but a new heat sink concept from Sandia National Laboratories seems to offer tremendous promise for computers, as well as cooling appliances. Designed by researcher Jeffrey Koplow, the new "Sandia Cooler" does away with a separate fan component, and instead relies on the heat sink itself to disperse heated air.

If you're familiar with traditional CPU heat sink designs, they usually feature a metal heat sink and a fan working in concert to siphon off the heat generated by CPU, graphics chips, and other computer parts that draw, and therefore emit, energy. The problem with that design is what's called the boundary layer of air that hugs the heat sink. That boundary layer retains heat, which the fan is then supposed to disperse. Because of the power necessary to drive the fan, as well as the fan's proximity to the boundary layer, that design is inefficient. The Sandia Cooler eliminates the fan, replacing it with a finned heat sink that can disperse the boundary layer far more efficiently since the two are in closer contact.… Read more

Urban Hopper robot can leap over 25-foot walls

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demoed its Precision Urban Hopper robot, a wheeled ground unit that can leap over 25-foot-tall obstacles and keep on truckin'.

Seen in the video below, released last week by the Sandia National Laboratory, the shoebox-size Hopper easily takes on a chain-link fence, bounces a bit after landing, and then keeps rolling. It seems that a piston-fired leg makes it fly.

The Precision Urban Hopper is being developed by Sandia and Boston Dynamics, creator of the famously creepy BigDog robot, for surveillance operations in urban terrain. Guided by GPS, it is designed to "… Read more

Sandia's second crack at fuel-air stun grenade

It took 20 years, but here it is--again: the new and improved flash-bang grenade.

Sandia National Laboratories, which created the original Mk 141 flash-bang two decades ago, is having a second go at marketing a "fuel air" version of an old SWAT standby that it says is far safer for law enforcement and the military.

Traditional flash-bangs are basically big fire crackers--the "flash powder," a mixture of aluminum and potassium perchlorate dust, explodes quickly when ignited and produces an intensely bright light along with its huge bang. The body or canister is generally a steel tube … Read more

Blowing up batteries--for your safety

Lithium-ion batteries. They do blow up good.

Peter Roth at Sandia National Labs is conducting research on the durability and reliability of lithium-ion batteries, which are expected to power plug-in hybrids and electric cars in the future. Lithium-ion batteries store more energy than conventional batteries--six times as much as lead acid and two to three times as much as nickel metal hydride batteries, according to Sandia. However, lithium-ion cells can have unfortunate side effects.

Namely, an internal short circuit can lead to fire and a nasty explosion. In 2006, Sony had to conduct a multimillion-dollar battery recall because some had … Read more

Tunguska study: Small asteroids pack a wallop

Sandia National Laboratories researchers have concluded that the asteroid that spectacularly blasted trees over Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30, 1908, was much smaller than earlier estimates suggested.

A supercomputer simulation shows the asteroid's mass turned into an expanding jet of high-temperature gas traveling at supersonic speeds, the Albuquerque, N.M.-based lab said in a December statement.

"That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider," principal investigator Mark Boslough said. His advice: "We should be making more efforts at detecting the smaller ones than we … Read more

New computers may eliminate need for nuclear tests

The government will spend $26 million on high-end computers to cut costs and standardize systems among the three U.S. labs charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded the multimillion-dollar contract to Milpitas, Calif.-based Appro to supply Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories with 438 teraflop high-performance computing clusters based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. To date, each of these labs had used its own combination of computer systems, which were not always compatible with the others.

"This … Read more