Some of the Navy’s top minds sailed into New York today, and brought with them a lit­eral boat­load of gad­gets: spray-​​on armor; remote con­trol rifles; cam­era phones that can read Arabic and Farsi; and this drone to the left, the Seaglider, which can swim for months at a time.
The Office of Naval Research docks its “Afloat Lab” on Manhattan’s West Side each May, as part of the annual Fleet Week cel­e­bra­tion here. It’s a way to demon­strate to the tax­pay­ers what Navy-​​funded sci­en­tists have been doing with their hard-​​earned lucre. This year, the 108 foot-​​long patrol craft is show­ing off nearly two dozen tech­nol­ogy projects — many of which are bound for Iraq, or have just returned from the Middle East.
My Wired News arti­cle has an arti­cle on a bunch of the giz­mos on dis­play. One device that didn’t make it into the story, how­ever, was a new-​​fangled head­band.
Brian McClimens is work­ing on ways for sol­diers to hear their com­mu­ni­ca­tions in 3D. Turns out that cross-​​chatter gets a whole lot more under­stand­able when you sep­a­rate out the voices, spa­tially. G.I.s can’t wear head­phones on the bat­tle­field, though. So Brian’s idea is to give a sol­dier a head­band, with speak­ers on it. Sounds come out of the speak­ers, bounce of the hel­met, and go into the grunt’s ears spa­tially cor­rect.
After a bit of soul search­ing, I decided not to pub­lish the mildly embar­ras­ing pic­tures of Brian wear­ing his inven­tion. Appropriately grov­el­ling e-​​mails may get me to change my mind, however.

New York City’s chief med­ical exam­iner is plan­ning “to test hun­dreds of DNA sam­ples a day from nearly every crime scene, includ­ing bur­glar­ized homes and stolen cars,” the Times reports. Before, DNA test­ing was only done rou­tinely only in homi­cides, rapes and the most seri­ous assaults.
“Because many prop­erty crimes do not yield blood, semen or saliva, the lab will use DNA sam­ples pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered too minus­cule to col­lect, like skin cells left in a smudged fin­ger­print or a ski mask, and match them against data­bases of con­victed felons, sus­pects and DNA pro­files from crime scenes and rape kits.”

Ever since they tan­gled with the Red Coats, American gen­er­als have been giv­ing their grunts more and more and more gear to lug — from rations to radios, body armor to bat­ter­ies. Now, for the first time, the Army has decided to junk the old uni­forms and start from scratch.
“We’re strip­ping the sol­dier down to his skin, and build­ing out from there,” said Jean-​​Louis “Dutch” DeGay, an equip­ment spe­cial­ist at the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, which is super­vis­ing the seven-​​year, $250 mil­lion over­haul, dubbed Future Force Warrior, or FFW.
One of the most obvi­ous changes is that the new uni­forms are uni­sex. The zip­per has been extended, and the uniform’s butt flap has been expanded, so GI Janes aren’t lit­er­ally caught with their pants down if they have to pee.
FFW’s body armor is prob­a­bly the biggest improve­ment, how­ever. It sits on a series of foam pads around the rib cage, so there’s a 2.5-inch gap between the har­ness and the body. It keeps the GI cool. And it’s almost imper­cep­ti­bly light — unlike today’s bul­let­proof vests, many of which are about as com­fort­able as that lead apron the den­tist makes you wear dur­ing X-​​rays. But the scarab-​​like shell can take five to seven direct hits from a machine gun, and it dou­bles as a hol­ster for ammu­ni­tion and grenades.
It also pro­tects the com­puter that future infantry­men are expected to rely on. Instead of the bulky cables that ordi­nar­ily con­nect the com­puter to a PDA or a helmet-​​mounted dis­play, FFW is sup­posed to use “e-​​textiles” — durable cloth, with wires woven in. The hel­met will inte­grate night vision into a built-​​in, half-​​inch mon­o­cle, and bone-​​conduction micro­phones will replace radio head­sets.
At first, the sen­sors were metal. But tests showed that “some people’s heads were lit­er­ally too thick for that to work,” DeGay said. Now, the metal has been replaced with a gel-​​based sen­sor that’s sen­si­tive enough to trans­mit pulse and breath­ing rates back to base, too.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.

First, Donald Rumsfeld clamped down on Defense Department web­sites, claim­ing the infor­ma­tion they offered was a national secu­rity threat. Now, he’s going after dig­i­tal cam­eras and cam­era phones, accord­ing to AFP.

Mobile phones fit­ted with dig­i­tal cam­eras have been banned in US army instal­la­tions in Iraq… the US Defence Department believes that some of the damn­ing pho­tos of US sol­diers abus­ing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with cam­era phones.
“Digital cam­eras, cam­corders and cell­phones with cam­eras have been pro­hib­ited in mil­i­tary com­pounds in Iraq,” it said, adding that a “total ban through­out the US mil­i­tary” is in the works. (via Boing Boing)

THERE’S MORE: “I spoke to sev­eral NJ Army Guard trans­porta­tion NCOs just back from Iraq and they told me that avail­abil­ity of free email ser­vices like YAHOO and HOTMAIL had been shut down on mil­i­tary pro­vided inter­net com­put­ers in the­ater,” one Air Force NCO tells Soldiers for the Truth.

In the ANG [Air National Guard] here in CONUS [the con­ti­nen­tal United States], wing level com­mu­ni­ca­tions flights and squadrons are DENYING or remov­ing access to free email ser­vices for mem­bers of each ANG unit. I LOST my access to both YAHOO mail and HOTMAIL on 5/​20/​04. Prior to that, I used to make con­tact using these sites even while at my unit. Now, I can no longer do so…
Many of the folks I spoke to used words like “cen­sor­ship” and “big brother” because they know that their mil domain email accounts are sub­ject to mon­i­tor­ing. These same folks said they feared say­ing any­thing crit­i­cal on a mil domain com­puter for fear of prosecution.

AND MORE: The report of a Defense Department-​​wide cam­era phone ban is bogus, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin now says. But there is a new direc­tive lim­it­ing the use of com­mer­cial wire­less tech­nol­ogy on the DoD’s “Global Information Grid.“
AND MORE: Xeni’s got a kick-​​ass round-​​up of the issue in today’s Wired News.