A revolutionary pair of men’s briefs are not just comfortable to wear but may also save lives as well.
An electronic biosensor is printed on the waistband and measures blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs through constant contact with the skin.

The technology was developed by nano-engineering Professor Joseph Wang of University of California San Diego.

He said stresses of everyday wear such as folding or stretching did not affect the performance of the sensor.

It is hoped the intelligent textiles will allow patients to be monitored at home rather than at hospital, cutting medical costs.

The method, outlined in The Royal Society of Chemistry journal, is similar to conventional screen-printing although the ink contains carbon electrodes.

The project is being funded by the U.S. military will first benefit American soldiers.

Professor Wang said: ‘This specific project involves monitoring the injury of soldiers during battlefield surgery and the goal is to develop minimally invasive sensors that can locate, in the field, and identify the type of injury.’

Ultimately, the biosensor that detects an injury will also be able to direct the release of drugs to relieve pain and even treat the wound. But the technology’s range of application goes beyond the military.

‘We envision all the trend of personalised medicine for remote monitoring of the elderly at home, monitoring a wide range of biomedical markers, like cardiac markers, alerting for any potential stroke, diabetic changes and other changes related to other biomedical scenario,’ Professor Wang said.

Wearable biosensors can also provide valuable information to athletes or even measure blood alcohol levels.

But Professor Wang said it could be some time before these smart underpants are worn by soldiers in the field as more work is needed to ensure the monitoring systems are robust and durable enough to cope with daily activity.

Despite this he concluded clothing-integrated sensors hold ‘considerable promise for future healthcare.’

Further validating the increasing role that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) play in 21st-century defense, the United States Air Force announced yesterday that it will institutionalize the remotely piloted aircraft pilot service field, establishing undergraduate RPA training that will make UAV pilot less a specialization and more a full-fledged operational career.

The first undergraduate UAS class will begin in October of this year, with training taking the candidates from flight training in Pueblo, Colo., to instrument qualification at Randolph AFB in Texas.

Like pilot training for manned aircraft, the selection process for the program will be rigorous, including physiological and academic tests aimed at ensuring only the most qualified get behind the sticks of the Air Force’s unmanned fleet. The program will also offer RPA incentive pay equal to aviation career incentive pay, as well as require a six-year service commitment. (Perhaps after a stint in the service, they can fly passenger drones at home.)
Essentially, the USAF is assigning a distinction – and a level of operational importance – to the nation’s UAV pilots who are playing a critical role in joint warfighting tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan. This could have something to do with U.S. drone policy coming under increased scrutiny in recent months, underscored by a review of a February incident that saw 23 Afghan civilians killed after a drone crew mistakenly identified a convoy of women and children as militants on the move.
But more likely, it’s a tacit recognition that the future of both peacekeeping and war making is tied to the technological advantages granted to commanders and troops on the ground by their unmanned comrades in the sky. As such, the first generation of professional, career USAF unmanned aerial systems operators will emerge in the next few years ready to take to the remote battlefields of the future.
[Via:Popsci]

China is aggressively accelerating the pace of its manned space program by developing a 17,000 lb. man-tended military space laboratory planned for launch by late 2010. The mission will coincide with a halt in U.S. manned flight with phase-out of the shuttle.

The first public appearance of China’s military space station concept.

The project is being led by the General Armaments Department of the People’s Liberation Army, and gives the Chinese two separate station development programs.

Shenzhou 8, the first mission to the outpost in early 2011 will be flown unmanned to test robotic docking systems. Subsequent missions will be manned to utilize the new pressurized module capabilities of the Tiangong outpost.

Importantly, China is openly acknowledging that the new Tiangong outpost will involve military space operations and technology development.

Also the fact it has been given a No. 1 numerical designation indicates that China may build more than one such military space laboratory in the coming years.

“The People’s Liberation Army’s General Armament Department aims to finish systems for the Tiangong-1 mission this year,” says an official Chinese government statement on the new project. Work on a ground prototype is nearly finished.

The design, revealed to the Chinese during a nationally televised Chinese New Year broadcast, includes a large module with docking system making up the forward half of the vehicle and a service module section with solar arrays and propellant tanks making up the aft.

The space station design was unveiled on a live broadcast to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

The concept is similar to manned concepts for Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle.

While used as a target to build Chinese docking and habitation experience, the vehicle’s military mission has some apparent parallels with the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program cancelled in 1969 before it flew any manned missions. MOL’s objectives were primarily reconnaissance and technology development.

While U.S. military astronauts were to be launched in a Gemini spacecraft atop their MOLs, in China’s case, the module will operate autonomously and be visited periodically by Chinese astronauts, to perhaps retrieve reconnaissance imagery or other sensor data. At least one unmanned Shenzhou was equipped with a military space intelligence eavesdropping antenna array.

Along with launch of the outpost, China is also beginning mass production of Shenzhou taxi spacecraft, says Zhang Bainan, the chief Shenzhou design manager.

All previous Shenzhous have been built as individual custom spacecraft for widely spaced missions. But China is now moving to Shenzhou assembly line production to increase flight rates.

In addition to operational mission objectives the Chinese mission plans will provide a propaganda windfall in China and send a global geopolitical message relative to declining U.S. space leadership.

The Tiangong vehicle’s debut in late 2010, and increase in Chinese manned mission flight rates will coincide with the planned termination of the U.S. space shuttle program and a five year hiatus in American manned space launches.

The first manned NASA Orion/Ares manned mission to Earth orbit is not likely until 2015 with manned lunar operations no earlier than 2020.

During that period China can rack up multiple attention getting missions, while Americans launched in the Russian Soyuz will draw meager attention unless they are involved in an emergency.

Along with the Tiangong announcement comes another major revelation – that China now has two manned space station programs under development.

• The new Tiangong series, that can be launched on the same type Long March 2F booster used to carry Soyuz-type Shenzhou manned transports.

• And a larger 20-25 ton “Mir class” station that will follow by about 2020 launched on the new oxygen/hydrogen powered Long March 5 boosters.

The Chinese have shown this editor numerous space station models and drawings during six trips to China over the last several years.

All of those concepts looked very similar to the Soviet Mir with a core and add-on modules– nothing like the Tiangong just revealed in China.

The heavier Mir type design, however, is the one being pursued for launch on the new Long March 5, Liu Fang, vice president of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) told me during a visit to Beijing last April. It will weigh twice as much as the man tended military outpost.

The Tiangong design is designed for short tasks or limited overnight stays in a pressurized shirtsleeve environment, while the heavier Chinese stations planned for several years from now will be for longer term habitation.

In addition to the manned program, the Chinese unmanned program has also reached a major milestone with the Chang’e lunar orbiter.

The spacecraft ended its 16 month science mission March 1 when commanded to fire thrusters to begin a 36 min. descent toward lunar impact at 0813 GMT.

Artist’s impression of China’s Chang’e lunar orbiter.

The impact point was calculated to be at 1.50 deg. south latitude and 52.36 deg. east longitude. on the opposite side of the Moon from where the descent was begun.

Chang’e-1 began its retrofire maneuver for capture by lunar gravity at 0736 GMT under the command of two ground control stations, one at Qingdao in eastern China and the other at Kashi in northwest China.

The spacecraft had been launched from Xichang on board a Long March 3 on October 24, 2007 and used its imaging system to obtain mapping imagery of the entire moon.

It was command deorbited to provide Chinese engineers with experience in calculating and controlling the descent of a spacecraft in lunar orbit. Lunar “masscons”, subsurface concentrations of heavy materials, can affect lunar gravity fields and orbital trajectories involved in deorbit.

This relates directly to China’s follow on plan to land a nuclear powered unmanned lunar rover by 2012-2013 followed by an unmanned sample return mission about 2017.

In 2010-2011, before the rover and sample return missions are flown a Chinese-technology mission may be sent to the Moon to further demonstrate landing technologies. But the Chinese were not clear on whether it would go all the way to the surface.

If successful, these missions also could upstage U.S. lunar plans for a time.

Here again we see the uselessness and cost of the war on drugs, it basically causes it’s own problems because of the illegality of drugs themselves, it is a vicious circle that will just continue to go round and round until or if drugs are legalized.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that authorities had arrested more than 730 people across the country in a 21-month investigation targeting Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel and its infiltration into U.S. cities.

The arrests, including 50 on Wednesday in California, Minnesota, Maryland and the nation’s capital, come amid growing concern in Washington that Mexican crime organizations are out of control and threaten the stability of parts of Mexico and the safety of U.S. citizens.

The Homeland Security Department has developed a plan to send more agents and other resources, and possibly military support, to the U.S.-Mexico border if the drug violence continues to spill over and overwhelm the agents stationed there, a department official confirmed.

The Pentagon is looking into a larger role in bolstering counter-narcotics efforts. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress on Wednesday that the corruptive influence and increasing violence of the cartels had undermined the Mexican government’s ability to govern parts of its country.

A recent State Department travel advisory warned U.S. citizens about the perils of travel in Mexico, likening the shootouts between authorities and the cartels to “small-unit combat.” The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center believes that Mexican cartels maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in as many as 195 U.S. cities.

And on Wednesday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the recent surge in drug-related violence on the Southwest border “has turned some American communities and neighborhoods into the Wild West.”

“A battle is building on the border, and U.S. citizens are getting caught in the crossfire,” Smith said, calling on House Democrats to hold a hearing on drug-related violence on the border. “Congress must address the violence before more lives are lost.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., in his first news conference since taking over as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, offered this as proof of the creeping spread of the Sinaloa cartel in the United States: the seizure of more than $59 million in illegal drug proceeds and large amounts of narcotics, including more than 24,000 pounds of cocaine, 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine and 1.3 million ecstasy pills.

Authorities also seized more than $6.5 million in other assets, 149 vehicles, three aircraft, three maritime vessels and 169 weapons.

“The dimensions of what we are breaking up today had nationwide implications here” in the United States, Holder said.

Special Agent Michele Leonhart, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the crackdown had denied at least $1 billion in drug revenue for the Sinaloa cartel, one of several syndicates fighting the Mexican government in a war that claimed the lives of more than 5,000 people in Mexico last year.

About 20 suspects have been arrested in Mexico as part of the crackdown, which has been coordinated by the DEA’s Special Operations Division in close cooperation with Mexico and dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Holder and top DEA officials said most, if not all, of the senior members of the cartel remained at large.

Mexican authorities Wednesday extradited the former leader of a separate cartel accused of smuggling tons of marijuana and cocaine into the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.

The suspect, Miguel Caro Quintero, headed the so-called Sonora cartel and faces federal drug-trafficking charges in Arizona and Colorado. He is the brother of Rafael Caro Quintero, a kingpin who was convicted and sentenced in Mexico for the 1985 killing of a U.S. drug agent, Enrique Camarena.

Holder said he had met with Mexican Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora on Tuesday to discuss how the two countries could cooperate to dismantle drug-trafficking organizations and root out corrupt government officials on both sides of the border.

“International drug-trafficking organizations pose a sustained, serious threat. They are national security threats,” Holder said. “They are lucrative, they are violent and they are operated with stunning planning and precision.”

Some federal law enforcement officials said the results of the investigation were being announced, at least in part, to address growing accusations that some senior elements of the Mexican government are aiding Sinaloa drug dealers or selectively going after competitors, allowing factions of the Sinaloa cartel to grow. Major corruption arrests in Mexico recently showed that a Sinaloa faction had paid senior officials in the Mexican attorney general’s office to notify it about impending enforcement actions.

A senior DEA official said top Mexican authorities were working closely with Washington to assess the damage from potential leaks from law enforcement officials, and to prevent them from happening.

Holder said the crackdown was considered one of the biggest binational successes against the Mexican cartels, but acknowledged that “this problem is one that will continue. This is an ongoing effort.”

The investigation started with the arrests of some alleged Sinaloa cartel members in California’s Imperial Valley and snowballed into as many as 160 inquiries in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, one senior DEA Special Operations official said.

One of its initial successes was the indictment of Victor Emilio Cazarez-Salazar, believed to be a leader in the Sinaloa cartel, DEA officials said. Cazarez-Salazar remains at large.

Holder and other officials said Wednesday that the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for bringing tons of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States through a sophisticated network of distribution and logistics cells in the country. It is also laundering millions of dollars in criminal proceeds, they said.

Those indicted in the cases have been charged with a variety of crimes, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise by violating various felony provisions of the federal Controlled Substances Act; conspiracy to import controlled substances; money laundering; and possession of an unregistered firearm.

Many of those in the United States were low-level operatives; some were illegal immigrants. At least several mid-level managers were believe to be in direct contact with leaders in Sinaloa, who also have been arrested, said the senior DEA Special Operations official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Thomas A. Schweich, deputy assistant secretary of State for international law enforcement in the Bush administration, said he saw good news and bad news in the Justice Department’s announcement.

“The bad news is that it shows that the cartels are everywhere, they are dangerous, and they are trafficking in everything,” he said. “The good news is that it shows that there are now cooperative, cross-border efforts to fight them. The cartels know no borders in what they do, and it is important that we know no borders in order to defeat them.”

The U.S. Department of defense has a very large interest and need in advanced education and its resulting research and development as demonstrated in this video depicting past victories related to technological advancement