The technique shows the most promise for biological imaging at the cellular level. Microscopes using the new lasers should be able to detect, for example, changes in individual proteins on the surfaces of cells.
Traditionally, vehicle mounted weapon systems required the operator to be exposed, usually with his head and shoulders sticking out of the top of the vehicle. Obviously this presents an enticing target to the enemy. To overcome this deficiency the US military has developed CROWS (common remotely operated weapon stations). With CROWS, the gunner is inside the vehicle, and observes his surroundings using video cameras with night vision and telephoto capabilities. CROWS also has a laser rangefinder and a stabilization mechanism that allows more accurate fire while the vehicle is moving. But it turns out that the real reason CROWS has been successful is that today’s soldiers grew up playing video games, very similar to the CROWS experience:
Since many troops have years of experience with video games, they take to CROWS quickly, and very effectively. That’s one reason, not often talked about, for the success of CROWS. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger. The army even has a CROWS trainer built into its America’s Army online game.
Frank Vahid, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California Riverside, has developed a new technology he calls “Warp processing” that gives a computer chip the ability to improve its performance over time.
Here’s how Warp processing works: When a program first runs on a microprocessor chip (such as a Pentium), the chip monitors the program to detect its most frequently-executed parts. The microprocessor then automatically tries to move those parts to a special kind of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. “An FPGA can execute some (but not all) programs much faster than a microprocessor – 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times faster,” explains Vahid.
The technology is most applicable to anything that is compute-intensive and operates on large streams of data.
Anyone who has been following the recent missions to Mars are familiar with the ongoing speculation about if and how much water might exist on the Red Planet. This is an extremely important question, because the presence of easily accessible water would mean that future manned missions to Mars could use that water to produce fuel once they arrive – rather than having to bring it with them. Canadian scientists appear to have answered the “if” question, now it just remains a question of “how much.”
Canadian researchers have discovered that a white, salty substance churned up by the Mars Spirit rover is the first “on-the-spot” evidence of water just beneath the surface of the Red Planet.
The discovery by physicists at the University of Guelph is the first solid proof based on soil samples, and reinforces earlier evidence from satellite images suggesting water lies trapped under the barren landscape.
Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.
“Basically, it’s almost like a replacement,” he says. “I don’t have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing.”
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Traditional microscope technology has been limited in resolution by a physical property of light called the diffraction limit. The diffraction limit states that light can only be focused into a beam as wide as half its wavelength. Researchers at Harvard University have overcome this limit by using nanoscale antennae to focus light down to beam as little as 100 nanometers in size.
Traditionally, vehicle mounted weapon systems required the operator to be exposed, usually with his head and shoulders sticking out of the top of the vehicle. Obviously this presents an enticing target to the enemy. To overcome this deficiency the US military has developed CROWS (common remotely operated weapon stations). With CROWS, the gunner is inside the vehicle, and observes his surroundings using video cameras with night vision and telephoto capabilities. CROWS also has a laser rangefinder and a stabilization mechanism that allows more accurate fire while the vehicle is moving. 
Anyone who has been following the recent missions to Mars are familiar with the ongoing speculation about if and how much water might exist on the Red Planet. This is an extremely important question, because the presence of easily accessible water would mean that future manned missions to Mars could use that water to produce fuel once they arrive – rather than having to bring it with them. 
Dr. Gaurav Khanna is trying to measure gravity waves – ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light – that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place. To do this he used to use grants from the National Science Foundation to rent time on various supercomputing sites spread across the United States – usually employing two-to-five hundred nodes at a time. But each time he did this is cost about $5,000.