U.S. Army

LEMV: Not Your Father's Blimp:  Lockheed Martin

The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), as it's called, will be 250 feet long, autonomous, and able to float at up to 20,000 feet for an impressive three weeks at a time. As for its surveillance capabilities, a 40-foot-long stretch behind the cockpit will house a selection of spy gear, including a motion sensor and radar.

Each equipped with $48,000 worth of GPS components, electronic maps, and wearable computers, troops of the Army's 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division are heading to Afghanistan as part of the resurrected Land Warrior program. The Army is hoping the revised, eight-pound set of gear will be more beneficial than when the $500 million program was canceled in 2006.

Since the airship glory days of the early part of the century, blimps have certainly lost some of their cachet, relegated to hovering over sporting events and not much else. However, the Army is about to test launch an unmanned hybrid airship to be used for surveillance missions in Afghanistan.

U.S. nuclear warheads might have been technological marvels a half-century ago, but today they're akin to a fleet of '57 Chevys — at least according to those who say the U.S. arsenal is begging to be traded in for a new model called reliable replacement warheads, or RRW.

For the last half-century, the U.S. has maintained its 5,400-warhead arsenal by replacing degraded plastic and rubber parts. But the most important part of the warhead — its explosive radioactive core — naturally decays over time and has not been replaced.

The warheads will remain dependable for at least 82 more years, or until the year 2091, according to a 2006 report by JASON, an independent scientific advisory group for the U.S. government. At that point, the warheads’ decayed cores could leave the U.S. with an impotent nuclear arsenal. "The concern is, can we keep the nuclear arsenal safe, reliable and effective for as long as we’ll need nuclear forces?" says John R. Harvey, a physicist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

There's playing online games, and then there's collecting 68 virtual "husbands" in a game. That's when Chinese parents intervene and send their wayward offspring to a boot camp staffed by soldiers of the People's Liberation Army.

If you need to temporarily blind someone, consider the DEF3. It's the latest flashlight dreamed up by the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-and designed by optics experts Science Applications International Corporation with flashlight maker SureFire-for use as an Army-issue non-lethal weapon.