“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

It’s one of the many memorable exchanges from “The Matrix.” But next time, Keanu Reeves should just talk to Christina Lomasney about getting some Modumetal armor—so he truly won’t have to worry about dodging anything.

Lomasney is the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based nanotech startup Modumetal, which has grand plans to reinvent the metals industry, not just body armor. Three months ago, Modumetal announced it had raised more than $1.5 million from the Alliance of Angels, Second Avenue Partners, and WRF Capital, to advance its development of nanolaminated structures—fundamentally new kinds of metals that are stronger and lighter than steel and can be used to make better armor, structural components, and corrosion- and heat-resistant coatings. The 17-person company has also raised just under $1 million in government contracts and grants.

But first, let’s flash back to 2007. In a formative meeting, Lomasney and her fellow co-founder (and former University of Washington physics labmate) John Whitaker were talking with Dan Rosen, chair of the Alliance of Angels, about the idea behind their company. “They looked like the cat that ate the canary,” Rosen recalls. “My comment was, ‘Do you guys really understand what you have there?’”

In what can be a telling exercise for any entrepreneur, Rosen asked them to write the Wall Street Journal article that would appear the day Modumetal was successful. They wrote two. The first said that all U.S. auto manufacturers had adopted Modumetal to make their cars, increasing their fuel efficiency by 50 percent. The second said the military had announced that new vehicles using Modumetal technology have saved 10,000 lives. “Both were very interesting glimpses of the future,” Rosen notes.

Fast forward to last week when I sat down with Lomasney (see photo, left), a Boeing alum, to discuss where things are going with Modumetal, hear more about its strategy, and get a tour of the facilities. Those ambitious Wall Street Journal milestones haven’t been met yet, but if anything, the vision for the company has grown.

Lomasney is not one to make speculative or unfounded claims. Her one-word summary of Modumetal’s culture is “competent.” Last summer, she said the company was transitioning from military to transportation applications. So when she now says, “We’re the next ArcelorMittal”—the world’s largest steel maker—you sit up and take notice. As she explains, the metals industry has not changed that …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Modumetal, an advanced materials startup, is closing a new round of equity funding worth between $1.5 million and $2 million, according to co-founder and CEO Christina Lomasney. The round includes existing Seattle-area investors Alliance of Angels and Second Avenue Partners, as well as new investor WRF Capital.

Modumetal “grows” what are called nanolaminated structures in vats using a patented process. These nanomaterials are essentially new kinds of metals that are stronger and lighter than steel. The original idea behind the company was to make better armor and structural components for the military and other applications, and the company has been supported in part by U.S. government grants. But Modumetal is now seizing some new opportunities, both short-term and long-term.

“Our vision has really expanded quite a lot,” Lomasney says. “This is turning out to be a much bigger market opportunity than we realized. This idea of creating a new dial for controlling material properties is really important to overcoming performance limitations in materials design.”

In particular, the new funding will be used to expand Modumetal’s effort in creating new kinds of coatings that resist corrosion in manufacturing lines, and withstand high temperatures in engines and turbines so they’ll run more efficiently. All while replacing toxic metals like chromium and cadmium, which are used in most anti-corrosion materials. It’s not the sexiest sounding application, but Lomasney says anti-corrosion and thermal barriers add up to a staggering $500 billion market. She says Modumetal’s first large-scale products will hit the market this year, targeted at aerospace manufacturers and the maritime industry, as well as transportation, military, and oil and gas sectors.

“This is a company that creates a brand new industry,” says Dan Rosen, chair of Alliance of Angels. “One of my co-investors said, ‘Am I wrong, or is this the biggest invention in metallurgy since the Bronze Age?’ You’re going to be able to create metals that have never existed before.”

Modumetal has grown (in a vat?) to 15 employees. I first reported on the company last summer, and will have more on its technology and strategy soon.

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San Diego’s General Atomics Aeronautical Systems said it has begun flight testing a jet-powered version of its Predator unmanned aircraft system (UAS) with a stealthier design and with the ability to operate aboard Navy aircraft carriers.

Dubbed the “Avenger,” the jet-powered version of the armed surveillance aircraft can fly as high as 60,000 feet and at speeds of roughly 460 mph (400 knots true air speed), which is almost twice as fast as the turboprop-powered Predator B, which has a top speed of 276 (240 KTAS). The Avenger’s first flight was April 4 at the company’s flight operations facility in Palmdale, CA, north of Los Angeles.

A recent preview on the Ares defense blog describes the Avenger as a “UCAV,” an unmanned combat aerial vehicle, designed with a sleek profile, folding wings, and a tailhook for landings aboard aircraft carriers. That could pose some furrowed eyebrows at Northrop Grumman, which has been developing the competing X-47B Pegasus in San Diego for Navy carrier operations under a Pentagon contract.

Developing unmanned aircraft with its own funding, rather than operating under a government contract, has been a hallmark of GA-Aeronautical Systems under retired Adm. Tom Cassidy. In a statement, Cassidy says, “Our company has been uniquely successful in forecasting military needs and delivering extremely capable aircraft that are ready for near-term military use.”

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San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has referred to SPAWAR, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, as one of the city’s best kept secrets, and I started to understand why during a presentation yesterday at San Diego’s Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

SPAWAR is a major Navy procurement agency, with a total budget of more than $2.4 billion in fiscal 2008. About 65 percent of that supports industry partnerships, which includes spending to acquire a host of hardware and software technologies needed for what the Navy calls C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance. Naturally, the Navy keeps most of this technology under wraps—literally. When maintenance crews work on U.S. warships at the Navy base here, they often wrap up parts of the superstructure before servicing the radar and other electronics.

So a presentation yesterday by Frank Gordon, who heads SPAWAR’s navigation and applied sciences department, represented an unusual opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Navy labs on Point Loma. SPAWAR is an enormous organization, with more than 6,300 civilian, military, and contract workers just at its San Diego headquarters, and local spending of almost $991 million on procurement contracts and R&D programs, according to the latest data available at SPAWAR’s web site. Gordon says that at any given time, SPAWAR is overseeing more than 800 technology development programs in San Diego.

About 100 people attended the session, which was sponsored by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Connect was founded at UC San Diego in 1985 as a resource for academic researchers who wanted to start technology-based companies based on their laboratory breakthroughs. At SPAWAR’s government lab in San Diego, scientists also spin out new companies and technologies, said Jim Fallin, a spokesman for SPAWAR Systems Center.

Gordon, who is nicknamed “Dr. Chaos” because of his love of nonlinear dynamics, highlighted some of the advanced technologies that SPAWAR is developing for …Next Page »

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It has taken roughly 10 years, but a robotic helicopter created in San Diego by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) is finally nearing a critical test phase for the U.S. Navy.

The unmanned aircraft, known as the Fire Scout, looks unremarkable, except for the fact that it has no windows. It is based on a small civilian helicopter, the Schweizer Model 333, and New York-based Schweizer Aircraft supplies the basic airframe.

But the electronics inside the gray helicopter are another story. Known in the military bureaucracy as a VUAS, or Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System, the Fire Scout is intended primarily for maritime reconnaissance and for “situational awareness” just beyond the edges of a Naval battle group. It also has a laser to pinpoint targets for the Navy’s laser-guided missiles and bombs. The robotic helicopter is designed to take off and land autonomously, fly as far as 110 nautical miles (about 126.6 statute miles), and operate continuously for 8 hours.

The Fire Scout and USS McInerney

When I noticed the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, MD, recently awarded a $40 million follow-on order to make three more Fire Scouts, I decided to ask Northrop for an update on the aircraft’s progress.

After completing a crucial series of tests in 2006, the Fire Scout is scheduled to undergo a technical evaluation aboard the guided missile frigate U.S.S. McInerney in the next few months. “The Navy wants to see how wind affects the aircraft and how it performs with the ship at sea,” says John VanBrabant, who heads business development for the V-UAS (Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System) group at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in San Diego.

To appreciate what this means, VanBrabant says the tests conducted in January, 2006, showed the helicopter’s electronics can land the Fire Scout autonomously on a moving Navy warship that was operating off the coast of Maryland. The robotic …Next Page »

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Here at Xconomy we usually focus on technologies already hitting the marketplace rather than laboratory-stage investigations. But last week we got wind of a project that’s so cool we just had to write about it: an effort to build tiny robot planes with flexible structures and built-in reflexes that would allow them to ricochet off walls or objects unharmed and recover their flight paths, the same way house flies bounce off windows.

They’re called “biomimetic micro air vehicles” or MAVs, and they’re the subject of a study at Harvard University and Andover, MA-based Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) that just won funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. PSI does contract R&D work on aerospace, energy, environmental, manufacturing, and medical technologies, and the eventual goal of the MAV project would be to create new kinds of indoor reconnaissance or surveillance craft, carrying tiny cameras, chemical sensors, and the like.

I got the lowdown on the project last week from Tom Vaneck, Physical Sciences’ vice president of space technologies and manager of disruptive technologies—of which the fly-like MAVs would certainly be one. Last time I talked with Vaneck, he was the head of Aurora Flight Sciences‘ Cambridge, MA-based R&D lab; he says he left the aerospace contractor for PSI earlier this year because “I am from a technology sense a little bit ADD,” and that at PSI, “I’m able to have my fingers in many different technology pies.”

Vaneck says there are two fundamental things to think about when a flying object hits a non-moving object. “One, how do you design a structure that can withstand the impact—because if the structure breaks or you are no longer able to generate lift or thrust, you’re done. Two, how do you recover without having to do a lot of environmental sensing or sophisticated computation—you need a method that’s almost instinctual, that automatically reorients the vehicle so that it can fly again.”

Well, those are both problems that evolution—”which has had a long, long time and an infinite budget,” in Vaneck’s words—has already solved. “When a fly hits a window it doesn’t fall down; it goes on to do it a hundred more times,” Vaneck notes.

So PSI is putting the $100,000, Phase 1 Air Force grant into a joint study with Robert Wood, a builder of biologically inspired robots at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory; he’s the creator of the world’s first artificial insect wing with enough lift to get itself off the ground. Together, researchers from PSI and Wood’s lab will study how houseflies and dragonflies recover from collisions, and think about materials such as carbon-fiber composites and a control system that could be used to duplicate the behavior.

The control system may be the harder problem to solve, since it will actually require the engineers to abandon most of the traditional principles of controlled flight. “If you think about a fly, its wing-beating motion if almost a resonant condition,” says Vaneck. “The fly is not continually thinking about moving its wings up and down. Its nervous system just creates a stimulus such that the wings flap, and through their design they generate lift. Now, after a collision, maybe one wing is generating more lift than the other; the control simply needs to go from one resonant condition to another. We think we can manage that without a computer. You just need a mechanism with several ’set points’ that it can switch between.”

Vaneck hopes the 9-month, Phase 1 grant will give the researchers enough time to build a simple prototype and “understand enough of how nature does this to map this over to a man-made system.” Then PSI will apply for a larger, longer Phase 2 grant that would lead to the construction of a working, remote-controlled MAV. “If we can make this work, it will fundamentally change the way people operate small unmanned aircraft,” he says.

I couldn’t resist asking Vaneck whether he ever worries that his work might result in the kinds of creepy insectoid probes often shown in movies like The Matrix or Minority Report. “You can’t help but think about that,” he answers. “Any technology can be morphed into something that is unintended. And there is this visceral reaction—if a movie gadget has to be evil and nasty, it is probably going to look like an insect. But the flip side of that is that insects are very robust systems.”

Vaneck also points out that a robot plane that looked and behaved like an insect might have the advantage of stealth. “If it’s truly bouncing around like an insect,” he says, “maybe it gets overlooked, because it kind of looks like something from the natural world.”

Of course, there’s a flip side to that as well: One good swing of the flyswatter could destroy a very expensive gadget.

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Boston’s EnerNOC, which runs “demand-response pools” consisting of companies, municipalities, and other organizations that agree to dial back their electricity consumption during hours of peak demand, said today that it’s won permission to sign up U.S. federal and military facilities as pool participants. The Pentagons’ Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) formally approved EnerNOC as a demand response provider—a potentially huge win for the company. “The federal government is the largest consumer of electricity in the United States and technology-enabled solutions like demand response can have a significant impact on reducing its energy consumption and costs,” EnerNOC chairman and CEO Tim Healy said in a statement.

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Ambric, a Beaverton, OR-based semiconductor company, has announced it is shutting down and looking for a corporate buyer. The firm has suspended all operations not having to do with its sale or existing customer agreements. Ambric has developed software-programmable parallel processor chips that are used in video coding, wireless base stations, and medical and military imaging. It has been funded by the likes of OVP Venture Partners and Northwest Technology Ventures.

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Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), which makes small robots for home and military applications, announced today that it has secured six grants totaling $4.4 million under the Pentagon’s Small Business Innovative Research program. The grants, which are aimed at making iRobot’s Packbot and small unmanned ground vehicle (SUGV) robots easier to use and at developing ways to coordinate ground robots and unmanned aerial vehicles, are coming from the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army Research Office.

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Seattle-based Delve Networks, a video management and media platform company, has launched a video-sharing site called TroopTube for U.S. military personnel and their families. Delve partnered with Texas-based Marion, Montgomery to deliver the service as part of Military OneSource, which is run by the Department of Defense.

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It’s a holiday for us here at Xconomy, as we join banks, schools, state and federal offices, and the rest of the nation in commemorating those who’ve served in the military. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a new bundle of stories.

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Chicago-based aerospace giant Boeing said today that it has finalized the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, of San Diego’s Tapestry Solutions, a 350-employee company that specializes in command-and-control, modeling, and simulation software for military and security organizations. The acquisition was first announced September 26.

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In case the word hasn’t quite gotten around, things are not pretty on the San Diego investment scene. As Greg wrote on Saturday, venture capital outlays in the third quarter fell to just $178.4 million, a 52 percent nosedive from the previous quarter and the most dismal quarterly showing for the region since Q1 of 2005, according to the new quarterly MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

What’s more, whereby the region had ranked 5th in the first quarter and 6th in the second, it fell to 13th place in the third quarter out of 18 regions tracked by the study. Only 22 venture deals were done in San Diego in the quarter, down from 38 the previous quarter and 41 for the same period a year earlier. This was also the lowest deal total since Q1 of 2005.

The nearby Los Angeles/Orange County region fared much better, with $572.5 million invested in 54 venture deals for the quarter, down just a bit from the $593.8 million from the previous quarter and up over Q1. The area ranked third in the nation for the quarter, behind only Silicon Valley and New England.

However downbeat the situation in San Diego, though, some big deals were done—starting with San Diego’s own The Active Network, which raised $80 million to help it provide online registration and other services for a variety of sporting events and activities. In fact, five area firms, in fields as diverse as energy, personal transportation, and security for pay TV, closed rounds of $20 million or more.

Following is a list of the area’s top 10 venture deals for the third quarter —and the venture investors behind them.

— The Active Network, San Diego, CA — $80 million
Investors: Citi Alternative Investments, Credit Suisse Customized Fund Investment, Good Energies, PCG Asset Management, US Renewables Group

— Sapphire Energy, Del Mar, CA — $40 million
Investors: Arch Venture Partners, Cascade Investment, Venrock, Wellcome Trust

— PowerGenix Systems, San Diego, CA — $30 million
Investors: Angeleno Group, Bessemer Venture Partners*, Element Partners, Granite Ventures, MILCOM Technologies, OnPoint Technologies, Technology Partners

— Aptera Motors, Carlsbad, CA — $24 million
Investors: Google, Idealab, Individual Investors

— Verimatrix, San Diego, CA — $20 million
Investors: Cipio Partners, Crescendo Ventures, Goldman Sachs Ventures*, JK&B Capital, Mission Ventures, SunAmerica Ventures

— ISE, Poway, CA — $17.5 million
Investors: DTE Energy Ventures, Inc., NGP Energy Technology Partners, RockPort Capital Partners, Siemens Venture Capital

— Sequoia Communications, San Diego, CA — $10.1 million
Investors: BlueRun Ventures, Tallwood Venture Capital

— Daylight Solutions, Poway, CA — $5 million
Investors: Not available

— Legend Films, San Diego, CA — $5 million
Investors: Augustus Ventures*

— AndroScience, San Diego, CA — $4 million
Investors: Grand Cathay Venture Capital, Industrial Bank of Taiwan

* lead investor

Source: Dow Jones VentureSource

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AgileNano, a San Diego startup that was conceived doing research on energy-absorbing nano-composites for use in bumpers, helmets and body armor, said today it got seed funding from the Tech Coast Angels. The technology is used to minimize blunt-force trauma injuries among military service men and women and to increase comfort and protection in sporting equipment such as shoes and helmets. The amount of angel funding was less than $500,000, but CEO Doug Giese says that’s enough funding to complete product development and hit other milestones for the next year or so.

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor has announced it has won a 21-month, $4.5 million contract from the Office of Naval Research to manufacture high-power, high-frequency gallium arsenide amplifiers. The technology is used in radar, electronic warfare, and communications applications. TriQuint (NASDAQ: TQNT) is a maker of integrated circuits for communications, defense, and aerospace.

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San Diego’s American Technology Corp. said today that U.S. military forces have placed additional orders totaling $400,000 for its Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, for use at security checkpoints in Iraq. Unlike an ordinary loudspeaker, the LRAD emits a focused sound beam, which can carry  warnings or instructions beyond 500 meters. 

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Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) said today that the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) will pay the company $3.75 million to build and deliver two “Warrior 700″ robots (pictured here.)

The Warrior, which has been under development for more than two years, is designed to serve as the big brother of iRobot’s popular Packbot device, which is already widely used for bomb-sniffing and other hazardous situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With a longer chassis and a much greater payload capacity, the Warrior will be capable of explosives disposal, firefighting, clearing buildings, and even extracting casualties from the battlefield, the company says. Special “payload positioning” software allows the robot to rotate its four treads and change its center of gravity to carry loads across difficult terrain.

“We are confident that the iRobot Warrior will secure a strong foothold within infantry, first responders and combat engineers,” Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division, said in a statement. The company plans to start selling production units of the Warrior in 2009.

TARDEC, at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, MI, is the Army’s laboratory for advanced military automotive technology. It develops manned and unmanned ground systems for combat support.

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The orders keep rolling in for iRobot. The Bedford, MA-based robot maker announced today that it has received two more orders from the U.S. Army involving its PackBot 510. The first is a $5.8 million order for spare parts and accessories for the robot, which soldiers use to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The second is a $13.3 million order to deliver 165 additional PackBots to the Army by the end of next April. The orders are part of the existing $286 million “xBot” contract awarded to iRobot last fall during a dramatic court battle with rival Robotic FX, which we covered extensively.

The announcement comes on the heels of iRobot’s recent entry into the underwater robot market, and the news that co-founder Rod Brooks (an MIT roboticist and Xconomist) has stepped down as chief technology officer. Earlier this month, we also reported that iRobot has won a separate five-year, $200 million Army contract to deliver PackBots and other robots, spare parts, training, and repair services.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) has delivered more than 1,800 PackBots to date—and it shows no signs of slowing. “The U.S. Army continues to show its support for our PackBot line of robots and the immediate need for unmanned ground vehicles to assist soldiers,” said Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division, in a statement.

Dyer added that iRobot is now capable of delivering 100 PackBots per month to the U.S. Armed Forces. Now if it could just invent a robot that could stop us from going to war in the first place…

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Every company chairman likes to grow her business—and one common way to do that is by finding new revenue streams. It’s just that for most companies, that stream doesn’t turn out to be the ocean.

IRobot isn’t most companies. On Monday, the Bedford, MA-based maker of land-based military and consumer robotics dived deeper into the field of UUVs—unmanned underwater vehicles—by announcing its $10 million acquisition of North Carolina company Nekton Research, which makes a prototype UUV called the Ranger. It was iRobot’s second foray into underwater vehicles this year, coming on the heels of January’s announcement that the firm had signed an exclusive licensing deal with the University of Washington to develop and produce its Seaglider craft.

There are vast differences in these two UUVs. The Seaglider is propeller-less and motor-less, built to cruise around the ocean for months on end in various sensing and measurement roles. Nekton’s Ranger, by contrast, has a propeller and is meant for very short-range missions that include reconnaissance, port security, and mine clearing. But together they form two prongs of a carefully thought out growth strategy that goes way back—and that iRobot is only now beginning to reveal in any detail. I caught up with chairman Helen Greiner to get the low-down, if you will, including the story of how iRobot took the plunge into what she calls its “next frontier”: underwater vehicles.

“We first started thinking underwater probably around two years ago,” Greiner told me. The impetus was an examination of what areas of robotics could iRobot tap to expand its business. One of the hallmarks of robotics, Greiner says, is that it offers a wide variety of directions and opportunities—ground-based vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), industrial, consumer, military robots, and of course underwater vehicles (called UUVs or AUVs, for autonomous underwater vehicles—although in our conversation Greiner stuck to the term UUV). This diversity, she says, “is one of the wonderful things about the field. But we really looked at what is the next big opportunity to build the most on what iRobot does well.”

That desire to use existing expertise led them first to the military side of the house. IRobot’s military business, built around the Packbot, was going “gangbusters,” in Greiner’s words. The UAV market, though, was already pretty mature—and didn’t seem to offer a whole lot of ripe-for-the-plucking opportunity. “They got off to a start maybe 20 years ago,” Greiner says, which means that UAVs even pre-dated the ground vehicles iRobot creates. “It took them maybe 20 years to get to [a market size of] $500 million.”

Underwater vehicles, though, were still in their relative infancy, offering a better chance to get in on the ground (maybe ocean is a better term here) floor. “And,” Greiner says, “we see the kind of applications that UUVs are useful [for] exactly along the lines of our military division’s strategy.” By that, Greiner is referring to iRobot’s tagline of building robots for “dull, dirty and dangerous missions…” For the Army, the PackBots do such work as reconnaissance of unknown or dangerous territory and hunting for improvised explosive devices. The Navy, of course, is looking for similar help in the sea.

IRobot strategists read all the publicly available studies of UUVs, including the master plans the Navy puts out about robotic systems of the future, which include ideas about undersea recon, mine clearing, hydrographic survey, exploration and mapping, infrastructure inspection, port security, and more. IRobot also engaged in a more private study of the field (Greiner didn’t go into much detail about that). And it studied developments in the underwater robotics market, including the announcement last December that Hydroid, the Pocasset, MA-based maker of robot subs, was to be acquired for some $80 million by Kongsberg Maritime of Norway. (The deal was completed this summer—and in April, before it was done, came word that the Naval Oceanographic Office, the wing of the Defense Department responsible for charting the ocean bottom, had signed a five-year support contract with Hydroid.)

IRobot could have developed its own underwater vehicles. But, Greiner says, “we believe it would reduce our in-house product development timeline probably by 18 to 24 months to do…acquisitions.” In addition to the time and money commitment involved in ramping up a new field totally in-house came the risk of losing the company’s …Next Page »

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Cyber Command Offline for Now

An Air Force project to coordinate the defense of military computer systems and launch offensives against enemy systems has been put on hold while higher-ups review the plan. The so-called Cyber Command was scheduled to go operational in less than two months before the Pentagon called a time out. InformationWeek says it’s possible the plan will be scrapped entirely.

Military Probes Frontiers of Cognitive Science

Soldiers who control machines with their brains and mind-reading systems for interrogating terror suspects are some of the possible benefits of applying advances in cognitive science to military aims, a new report says. The Department of Defense asked a committee of the National Research Council to evaluate cognitive science research to see what it might lead to, Wired reports. Among the possibilities: brain scans that can tell whether a suspect is lying, and machine-brain interfaces that allow people to control robotic prostheses or software at a distance. As one wag wonders, haven’t they ever seen “The Terminator”?

Genome Scans Could Improve Biofuels

Understanding the genomes of the organisms involved could allow scientists to engineer better plants and improve the biofuel-producing microbes that feed on them, according to a paper appearing in the journal Nature. Ars Technica says there’s already been a lot of work looking for ways to improve the characteristics of cellulose in plants, which contains more potential for fuel than the less complex sugars in corn kernels. And although researchers know of many bacteria that can break down cellulose, they don’t yet understand how they work.

Poet Announces Cellulosic Ethanol Plan

At least one company says it’s ready to start making ethanol from cellulose, at least on a small scale. Poet, of Sioux City, IA, which is the country’s top ethanol producer, has started building a pilot facility in Scotland, SD, and plans to produce ethanol from crop waste by the end of the year, Reuters reports. The company’s hope is to increase the supply of ethanol without driving up food prices.

Disclosing Bugs is Best, Experts Say

While MIT students and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority argue in court about whether the students can talk about flaws they found in the MBTA’s fare-card system, computer security experts say that suppressing such research could ultimately make computers more vulnerable to attack. Technology Review quotes experts as saying that security flaws won’t get fixed if the public doesn’t hear about them, and that the students should be viewed as providing a free service rather than posing a threat.

Lab Breaks Solar Cell Record

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says it has set a new record for efficiency in solar cells, the Associated Press reports. The NREL developed a solar cell that converts 40.8 percent of the light striking it into electricity, and that can probably be improved, a spokesman said. Raising conversion efficiency is one way to bring the cost of solar power down to where it can compete with coal.

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