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This is what happens when engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Lockheed Martin, hunt in their spare time; they design and patent a bullet which can be guided by a laser. Normally when people envision something laser-guided they think of a bomb filled with complex electronics. The prototype bullet though was made from commercially available parts and could be, "fully developed inexpensively and rapidly."

Behind the metal tip actuators control small fins which steer the bullet on its course. The fins are able to correct the bullet’s path as much as 30 times per second. This actually is a major difference from laser-guided bombs. The bombs are so massive and hard to move that every course correction has to be precisely planned and executed. The margin for error is much larger with the bullet though because how of quickly it can be corrected. This allows a large component to be absent from the design.

The design is meant for a small-caliber, smooth-bore firearm (no riflings) and has an effective range of 2 Km, which is more than a mile. At just half that distance the difference between this and an unguided bullet is astounding. An unguided bullet can miss a target 1 Km away by 9 m, while the guided bullet should be within 0.2 m, according to the patent. Using conventional gun powder the bullet can reach Mach 2.1, but the engineers are confident they can reach standard military speeds with customized gunpowder.

Potential users of this bullet are the military, law enforcement, and recreational shooters.

(The image is of a test shot which had an LED attached to the bullet.)

Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, are small devices which utilize phenomena such as the piezoelectric effect which connects electrical and mechanical energy. A particular field where this technology could be quite useful is medicine as MEMS could be used as medical-sensor implants. Sensors require power though, and the researchers at Purdue University have an interesting idea for how to supply the energy.

With a piezoelectric cantilever the researchers created a sensor that can be powered by music. If the frequencies in the music are in the correct area, the resulting vibrations will power the sensor. For this particular sensor, when the music stops the stored up energy is released, triggering the sensor to collect and transmit pressure data. The sensor is meant to measure the pressure of the bladder and blood vessels damaged by an aneurism.

While testing the design, the researchers compared music selections from four genres; rap, blues, jazz, and rock. As the sensor is most sensitive to frequencies ranging from 200 Hz to 500 Hz, rap won. Personally I’d like to see how pieces by Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky would perform.

Recently, some rumors have swirled about what the Next Xbox will be like, and even when we can get our hands on it. Microsoft's French marketing manager clarified one point of the rumors, and that is there will be no new Xbox in 2012. With Nintendo launching the Wii U this holiday season, many wondered if Microsoft would do the same in order to compete. The French official shot down those rumors, and said that Nintendo advances at its own pace to show off the new innovations, first with the Wii and soon with the Wii U. Microsoft does not think the Xbox 360's development cycle has fully run its course, and Cedrick Delmas, the French official, points to the lack of a price cut for the 360 as a way to show no new console is on the horizon. This does not rule out the possibility of a new console at least being announced at E3 this year, but Microsoft has no plans to release one near the end of the year.

I suspect there is going to be a renewed interest in graphene because of this research.

Graphene is a single-atom thick plane of carbon with extraordinary properties. It conducts heat and electricity better than any known material at room temperature; it is the strongest material known to man, while also being flexible; and now it, or rather graphene oxide, is permeable only to water. Researchers at the University of Manchester, where graphene was first discovered, decided to study graphene oxide membranes made of layers of the material. The membrane was used to seal a metal container filled with different compounds, and a sensor was placed to detect anything coming out. Only one thing did; water.

The fact that water got through the membrane may not be all that surprising. After all, there are a lot of materials it gets through, but there are incredibly few that helium gets through. For molecules, helium is the smallest you will ever find (molecular hydrogen consists of two atoms, making it twice as large as molecular helium) so one would expect it would get through just about anything. Not graphene oxide though.

Why is it water can get through graphene oxide but helium can’t? The researchers believe this is because exactly one layer of water, as ice, can fit between the graphene layers, which will slide around without any friction. If another molecule tries to fit in between the layers, it finds the graphene capillaries collapse in low humidity, or are clogged with water. The end result is nothing gets through but water, and water evaporates through the membrane as if it were not there.

As a test of this, the researchers sealed a bottle of vodka with a graphene oxide membrane. Since the alcohol could not evaporate away, like the water, the concentration just increased more and more as time passed. Naturally none of the researchers drink vodka; they just thought this would be a fun experiment. They also do not believe graphene will enter the distilling industry, but with such an interesting and unusual property, they are sure graphene will show up somewhere in a filtration system.

We have the Arctic White Edition of the Corsair 500R Mid-Tower Case in our roundup today along with a shiny red mid-tower offering from NZXT in the form of the Phantom 410. In gaming, we get an opportunity to check out Star Wars: The Old Republic for the PC. We have yet another mechanical keyboard in the roundup today with the Cooler Master QuickFire that eschews the numerical keypad for a more svelte footprint on your desktop. There are plenty more articles in the roundup today and you can access them all by following the links below.

Cases
Corsair Carbide 500R Arctic White Edition @ Madshrimps
NZXT Phantom 410 Chassis @ TweakTown

Cooling
Glacialtech Igloo H58 Heatsink @ Frostytech

Gaming
Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) PC @ TweakTown

Input Devices
Cooler Master QuickFire Keyboard @ LanOC Reviews

Memory
GeIL Enhance Corsa PC3-12800 1600MHz 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit @ Madshrimps

Notebooks/Tablets
Unboxing the Le Pan II TC979 Tablet @ ThinkComputers

Storage/Hard Drives
Kingston Data Traveler Gets The HyperX Treatment @ Computer Ed

Video
Catalyst 12.1 Windows 7 Driver Analysis @ TweakTown

Miscellany
Five Years With Blu-ray - Part One @ TweakTown