Uncle Sam Wants YOU to Design a Military Rescue Vehicle

The army's secretive technology division has been collecting dozens of ideas for the design of its in-the-works rescue vehicle via a social-media contest -- relying solely on the power of the crowd to get the next big thing built.

So perhaps the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will build the Armadillo, a vehicle with an extendable "tail" that creates more room in a back compartment for up to three injured war fighters to rest comfortably until they return to base for medical attention.

It has terrific wide windows for a good look around and a roof that slides open if you need to take a 360-degree survey of the area.

Or maybe the Department of Defense (DoD) instead will produce the Padré, a reconfigurable vehicle that provides maximum comfort to the scout team riding in it. Soldiers can change its modular storage system to hold cargo or to connect sensor units or a weapon.

Or DARPA could choose to cruise in the T34: Soldiers can connect light armor panels to its side when they enter a hot zone to rescue their compatriots -- and ditch the armor to roll really fast. It sports periscope visors along its side to expand the field of vision for the crew, regardless of its armored state.

As intriguing as these vehicles are, what's cooler is the idea behind it: the potential for ordinary people to collaborate on something as important as a new military vehicle.

Anyone at all can submit a design, draw over existing designs or provide in-depth comments for their creators to incorporate. Designs can then be adapted and resubmitted, up until the deadline. Local Motors of Chandler, Ariz., is running the competition, officially known as the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge, through March 10.

It’s not so different than when multiple users edit a page on Wikipedia, Local Motors CEO John Rogers told FoxNews.com.

“Effectively, we want to co-create all aspects of a vehicle,” Rogers explained. “The Wikipedia method of co-creation is really not far off from the way we talk about it. It is the collaboration between a company and a customer or a company and a community of people who are enthusiasts or informants. And we want all of those people to take part in the creation of this vehicle.”

The military will judge the submissions and build a concept model from the winner in June. Such co-creation of vehicles, tapping into the power of the Internet to "crowd source" design, is the specialty of Local Motors, Rogers said.

So perhaps someone has a great ideal for a specific part of a vehicle and how it could operate more efficiently. But someone else has studied the perspective of enemy forces, and better knows how they would react to such a part. Perhaps yet another contributor would have great insight into how to supply those parts.

“All of these people have a stake. They are stakeholders in a vehicle when it is produced. So co-creation is about tying into those groups and getting those people to inform the process,” Rogers declared.

Rogers stressed that the co-creation process does not leave things to chance. Local Motors guides it. Some of the decisions on the XC2V vehicle have been made already, for example, like the basic, downloadable 3-D models that designers build their additions over.

The competition is a co-creation effort, therefore, because participants are working with Local Motors -- not by themselves. “We don’t hold ourselves bound in our vehicle development process to have to ask the crowd for an example and a competition and a discussion on every aspect of the vehicle,” Rogers noted.

The XC2V Design Challenge, which already has dozens of incomplete entries after running for slightly over a week as of press time, will result in the construction of a concept vehicle, said Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, deputy program manager for the DARPA Adaptive Vehicle Make portfolio, which is testing the waters with the XC2V Design Challenge.

In this way, the process for creating the XC2V vehicle itself serves as a proof of concept. If it works, DARPA will refine the process of crowd-sourcing and start a series of prize challenges that will result in a true infantry fighting vehicle.

“Adaptive Vehicle Make is about more than just building an infantry fighting vehicle; it’s about building a new process and a new set of tools to support that process to allow us to design complex, cyber-electro-mechanical military system much faster."

"It takes us 10 or 20 years to develop a complex military system like a jet or a ship or a tank. We want to reduce that by a factor of five to ten,” Wiedenman told FoxNews.com.

Navy Breaks World Record With Futuristic Free-Electron Laser

The Navy just set a new world record, a test blast from a new type of laser that can shoot cruise missiles from the sky in seconds with a deadly accuracy that simply doesn't exist in the military’s vast arsenal today.

And that new record moved them one step closer to proving the "holy grail" of laser guns is real.

To create incredible power requires incredible energy. After all, the more power one puts into a laser accelerator, the more powerful and precise the light beam that comes out on the other end. During a private tour of the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA., on Friday, FoxNews.com saw scientists blast unprecedented levels of power into a prototype accelerator, producing a supercharged electron beam that can burn through 20 feet of steel per second.

Scientists there, in coordination with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), injected a sustained 500 kilovolts (KV) of juice into a prototype accelerator where the existing limit had been 320 kV -- a world’s record, the scientists explained.

“This is brand new -- it has not been done before, in the world,” said Carlos Hernandez-Garcia, director of the injector and electron gun systems for the FEL (Free Electron Laser) program, who added that Friday’s breakthrough was the culmination of six years of development.

But what does this mean to the Navy, and to war fighting in particular? Quentin Salter, program manager for ONR, said the test steps up the transition to newer, more powerful laser technologies.

“It’s huge in regards to upgrading the laser power beam quality,” he said. According to ONR officials, that laser beam will eventually perform at a staggering “megawatt class,” a measure of the laser's strength. Right now, the accelerator at Jefferson Lab is performing at just 14 Kilowatts.

Next up for the tech: additional weaponization. The Navy just awarded Boeing a contract worth up to $163 million to take that technology and package it as a 100 kW weapons system, one that the Navy hopes to use not only to destroy things but for on-ship communications, tracking and detection, too -- using a fraction of the energy such applications use now, plus with more accuracy. Saulter said they hope to meet that goal by 2015.

“We’re fast approaching the limits of our ability to hit maneuvering pieces of metal in the sky with other piece of flying metal,” explained Rear Admiral Nevin P. Carr Jr., Chief of Naval Research, in an interview with FoxNews.com. That’s why he calls free election laser technology or “directed energy” tech “our marquee program.”

While Carr acknowledges that this is not “something that we are going to wave a wand at and it’s going to appear” -- in fact, the Navy doesn't expect to hit the ultimate megawatt goal until the 2020s -- there have been several incremental victories that have pushed this project ahead of schedule that have scientists and program managers excited.

“With every single milestone, [the naysayers] have been proven wrong,” said Dr. George R. Neil, associate director of the FEL program at Jefferson Lab. Neil pointed to a bottle of champagne in the control room -- that one was for when they met the 10 kW threshold four years ago, nearly a decade after the Navy began funding the development of the FEL accelerator at the Newport News facility.

Today, Neil and others have shown that they have the ability to harness super-conducting electron power.

The military already uses lasers across the spectrum. What make this technology different (and its potential so extraordinary) is its power source.

The military now uses solid-state lasers that use crystals and glass, as well as chemical lasers that use often dangerous liquid materials. The FEL is different. It requires only electrons, which can be created from matter inside the injector with energy that is constantly recycled. In other words, it uses less shipboard power than current weapons systems. “It won’t slow down the ship,” Saulter said.

In addition, according to Navy officials, the FEL laser can perform at different wavelengths, meaning it can operate at lower and more powerful levels so that it can be used for different applications, which other laser technology cannot. It is also not vulnerable to atmospheric conditions, as solid-state lasers are, making them wane in power depending on the weather.

“The fact that you can tune the wavelength, that’s what makes it different. You can optimize the beam for the conditions of the day -- that’s really powerful,” said Adm. Carr. “So in a warfighting sense, the FEL’s ability to do that on a ship makes it much more attractive” than other laser technology.

The scope of the project from start to finish is impressively daunting. It's outfitted with enough piping, conductors, cables and other material to fill a small gymnasium, and they do this all at the lab.

The Navy must not only figure out a way to harness the electron beam into a light ray, but to shrink the accelerator down to size so that it would fit neatly on a Navy destroyer.

But for now, researchers take each milestone as proof they are moving in the right direction. The Navy has asked for $60 million for its directed energy budget for 2012. As for Friday’s 500 kV breakthrough, they say it’s a big one.

“This will shorten the timeline for the Navy to get to the Megawatt” league, Saulter said. Clearly, the day's events were a feather in everyone’s cap.

Apple Reports Labor, Safety Problems at Suppliers

Apple Inc. says its audits found labor, safety and other abuses by its suppliers in 2010, though it praised Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn for saving lives through its handling of a spate of suicides at its factories in China.

The findings, outlined in Apple's annual supplier responsibility report, prompted local reports Wednesday to decry the "high price" paid by Chinese workers who assemble hit gadgets like the iPod and iPad.

"Apple Releases Supplier Report: Chinese Environmental Groups Dissatisfied," said a headline Wednesday in the state-run newspaper 21st Century Business Herald. "China Pays a High Cost for Apple's Success," said the Shanghai Daily.

Apple's report lists steps the company has taken to deal with underaged workers, involuntary or debt-bonded labor and unsafe handling of dangerous chemicals, among other abuses found in audits of 127 production facilities.

Cupertino, California-based Apple has sought to keep secret details of its production in China, where many of its top gadgets are assembled. But a string of suicides at the heavily regimented factories of Taiwan-owned Foxconn Technology Group last year drew unwelcome attention to conditions faced by workers in China who put iPhones and other devices together.

Meanwhile, the company said it was working with Foxconn, a major supplier to many electronics makers, to help prevent further suicides at its factories, which employ more than 920,000 people and are expanding into China's inland areas.

"We were disturbed and deeply saddened to learn that factory workers were taking their own lives," said the report. It praised Foxconn's improved support for its mostly young, migrant work force and said an independent investigation had found Foxconn's handling of the problem "had definitely saved lives."

Apple said its audits found 91 underaged workers at 10 Chinese factories.

China allows employment only from age 16, although many children leave school before then. In the worst example, Apple said it stopped doing business with a factory that had hired 42 underaged workers supplied by a vocational school that had falsified their documents.

Apart from other labor problems, such as excess working hours, the company said that it required suppliers to reimburse $3.4 million in overcharges by employment agencies that provided contract migrant laborers from various countries in Asia, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam to factories in Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.

The report acknowledged other troubles, such as inadequate safety provisions at factories, including one case last year in which dozens of workers were poisoned by unsafe handling of the chemical n-hexane at a factory in Suzhou, near Shanghai.

Apple said it required the supplier, Wintek, to stop using the chemical and repair its ventilation system and will audit the factory again this year to ensure it is complying with its standards.

Chinese environmental groups are growing increasingly outspoken on such issues and a report released last month by three dozen groups, "The Other Side of Apple," accused the company of being the least responsive to health and safety concerns among more than two-dozen companies that were surveyed.

While contracts for Apple components are lucrative, the company's rigid quality standards led contractors to do whatever they can to ensure their products pass muster, the 21st Century Business Herald said, citing Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun, whose Beijing-based Institute for Public & Environmental Affairs helped compile the "Other Side" report.

Ma said Wintek had gotten better results using n-hexane, a solvent that can cause nerve damage, rather than alcohol to clean screens and switched to the more toxic chemical without telling Apple.

Overall, Apple said it ordered changes by 80 suppliers that were found to be mishandling or improperly storing hazardous chemicals.

The Institute for Public & Environmental Affairs welcomed what it called Apple's "positive steps" in acknowledging the poisoning at Wintek, but said its claim that all the workers affected had returned to work was "highly conflicting" with what the workers have said.

"Many of them have been categorized as occupationally disabled. Their condition therefore makes it dangerous for them to return to the Apple production line and to be exposed to chemical substances such as acetone," it said in a statement Wednesday.

The NGO also chastised Apple for not providing specific details about other environmental risks, saying it was studying further cases it had found.

NASA Releases First 360-Degree View of Entire Sun

NASA has released the first 360-degree view of the entire sun today, just in time for Super Bowl Sunday.

The photo comes courtesy of NASA's twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft, which aligned exactly opposite each other on opposite sides of the sun to capture the image.

The ability to see the whole sun, front to back, will allow scientists to better understand complicated solar weather patterns and plan for future robotic or crewed spacecraft missions throughout the solar system, researchers said.

"The sun is a truly complex object which influences many aspects of our lives," Richard Harrison, principal investigator for the U.K. instruments on STEREO, said in a statement. "In the same way that you would not expect to understand the workings of the brain by studying just a small part of it, a global investigation into the nature of our star as a complete object is essential to understanding how it works."

Harrison is also co-investigator of NASA's SDO mission (Solar Dynamics Observatory), which contributed to the new 360-degree view with high-resolution sun photos taken from orbit.

Scientists particularly want to better predict space weather and the violent eruptions that can spout from the sun's surface. These eruptions can damage satellites, disrupt communications and disable power systems on Earth.

NASA's STEREo spacecraft artist's illustration.

"Solar missions such as STEREO and SDO not only give us more information about star formation and evolution throughout our universe, but are of vital importance in our quest to further understand the sun's processes and the effect they can have on our planet and way of life," said David Parker, director of space science and exploration for the U.K. Space Agency. "This spectacular 360-degree view is another triumph for the STEREO mission, which continues to obtain some of the best images yet of the sun."

The two identical spacecraft of the NASA STEREO mission were launched in October 2006. They are offset from one another, one flying ahead of the Earth and the other behind.

SDO is the first mission in NASA's Living with a Star program and was launched in February 2010. SDO's unique orbit allows high-resolution images of the sun to be recorded every three-quarters of a second.

Search Engine Slap Fight: Microsoft Denies Cheating, Blames Google

Is Microsoft cheating? Did Google use "click fraud?" And what's Yahoo up to, anyway? Following a months-long sting operation, Google took a swing at Microsoft on Tuesday, claiming the company was copying results from Google for its Bing search engine. The search giant said Microsoft was sucking data from Google's search results and using them to -- put nicely -- inform its own search engine.

Microsoft just slapped back.

In a blog posting titled "Setting the record straight," Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, senior veep in the Online Services Division, said it was by no means cheating -- and Google was the one playing fast and loose with the rules.

"In simple terms, Google’s 'experiment' was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as click fraud. That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results," he wrote.

Google has been engaging in click fraud? Interesting. But that's not all.

"We have brought a number of things to market that we are very proud of -- our daily home page photos, infinite scroll in image search, great travel and shopping experiences, a new and more useful visual approach to search, and partnerships with key leaders like Facebook and Twitter," Mehdi wrote.

"If you are keeping tabs, you will notice Google has 'copied' a few of these."

Strong words indeed, but an understandable response to Google's Amit Singhal, who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. He made his position crystal clear to FoxNews.com on Tuesday: “Our testing has concluded that Bing is copying Google web search results,” Singhal told FoxNews.com.

Google grew wary of potential copycats in October, 2010, when engineers noticed that bizarre misspellings were returning the same set of results on both Google and Bing searches.

Unsure, but suspicious, Google set up a trap. From December 17 to December 31, engineers inserted a “honeypot” result as the top result for specific search queries -- including, hiybbprqag, mbzrxpgiys, and indoswiftjobinproduction -- and waited to see if the same results would appear on Bing. Lo and behold, the identical results popped up.

"It's cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years -- but they just get there based on our hard work,” a frustrated Singhal told Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land. “I don't know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it's like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line."

So who can mediate when two of the biggest search engines battle? Thank heavens for Stephen Colbert.

The comedian entered the fray Wednesday night, with a tongue in cheek definition of "hiybbprqag," one of the nonsense words Google used to spring its trap.

Intel Finds Major Flaw in Newest Computer Chips

Intel has found a defect in one of its chips, hurting its credibility during a major product launch and at a time when demand for microprocessors in PCs is being threatened.

The company said on Monday it stopped shipments of the chip used in personal computers with its most advanced Sandy Bridge line of processors and has already started production of a new version.

For Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, the design flaw is another distraction at a time when it faces sluggish personal computer sales and a major challenge from the exploding popularity of mobile devices, a market dominated by Britain's ARM Holdings.

"Does it change the perception of Intel's quality? Yes, probably. You've got real product out there that's been qualified and tested and green-lighted, and then you come back to say there's a problem and you have to recall," said Wedbush analyst Patrick Wang.

Intel has a good history of semiconductor manufacturing but it was criticized in the 1990s after it corrected but did not disclose a flaw in one of its Pentium processors.

Intel cut its first-quarter revenue forecast by $300 million and expects the total cost to repair and replace the chip to be about $700 million. Full-year revenues are seen unaffected.

The Santa Clara, California, company said the defect was discovered after it shipped more than 100,000 of the chips to computer manufacturers getting ready to sell new PC models with the Sandy Bridge processor, which Intel touts as its biggest-ever leap in processing power.

Had the problem gone undiscovered, about 5 percent of PCs using the new chipsets could have failed over a three-year period, Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC Client Operations at Intel, said on a conference call.

"It would be a low and continuing failure rate over the life of the systems," he said.

Intel's shares were down 0.6 percent on the Nasdaq shortly before the close.

Advanced Micro Devices' shares jumped 4.4 percent to $7.82 as investors bet Intel's setback would give its smaller rival an edge.

AMD this year is launching its own new lineup of processors, code-named Fusion, which will compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge chips for PC design wins.

PCs using the chips started shipping on January 9, and Intel said a "relatively small" number of them are likely to have been bought so far by consumers. It had sent a bit fewer than 8 million of the faulty chips to manufacturers.

While Intel's processors are the brains in 80 percent of the world's PCs, the company has yet to make its mark in mobile gadgets that are increasingly used to surf the Web, manage email and perform other tasks once exclusively the province of PCs.

Some worries about Intel were eased earlier this month when it reported better-than expected revenue and margins for the fourth quarter and gave a rosy outlook for early 2011.

Despite lukewarm growth in PC sales last year, the Semiconductor Industry Association said on Monday worldwide chip sales for 2010 rose 32 percent to a record $298.3 billion. But it warned that this year it expected only "moderate single-digit growth" for the industry as a whole, as the faltering economy continues to suppress growth in demand.

Intel does not expect the problem with its so-called Cougar Point chipsets, which let the central processor interact with the memory, hard disk drives and other parts of the computer, to hurt its full-year revenue. It will deliver an updated version of the chip in late February.

But since the flaw affected some of the chips shipped in the fourth quarter, Intel plans to take a charge that will reduce gross margin by roughly 4 percentage points for that period.

It will also take a first-quarter charge that will cut gross margin by 2 percentage points.

HIGH VOLTAGE

Intel said its engineers zeroed in on the newest defect last week after manufacturers stress-tested the chips with high voltage and temperatures. The flaw could have stopped computers from being able to communicate with their hard disk drives or DVD drives.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC maker, and Dell, ranked No. 2, declined to comment.

"It's obviously a negative and a surprise. We think they can recover from this very quickly. This product was just being introduced and there's not many in the field," said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.

He said investors should buy shares of Intel if the stock appears under pressure from the Cougar Point problem.

The chip flaw, along with its recently completed acquisition of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG's wireless unit and the purchase of security software firm McAfee, expected to close in this quarter, prompted Intel to revise its overall outlook.

Helped by the deals, it expects first-quarter revenue of $11.7 billion, give or take $400 million, compared with its previous expectation of $11.5 billion, give or take $400 million.

"As a long-term investor in the stock I won't be changing my perspective on the shares, but in the short term this is a surprise," said Ralph Shive, manager of the $1.7 billion Wasatch-1ST Source Income Equity Fund. The fund owns shares of Intel.