Watch what happens when you put different things in the microwave. Items that get fried include soap, a ping pong ball, a lit match, a CD and gunpowder.

I have always love sticking things in the microwave and watching what happens, unfortunately my parents did not find it as interesting.

Putting random things in the microwave can yield pleasing visual results, but be warned; there is an element of danger involved. 800HighTech can not be held responsible for your own actions!

Soap

Watch as the bar of soap morphs and grows, almost filling the half of the microwave.

Gunpowder

This is one you definitely should not try at home! Gunpowder turns your microwave into an improvised bomb.

CD

Check out this amazing display of light as a CD sizzles and crackles in the microwave.

Match and Glass

This little set up produces more amazing fireworks. Half way into the clip burning plasma jumps from the flame engulfing the glass, soon causing it to smash.

Ping Pong Ball

The guys who made this video didn’t allow enough time for the desired effect the first time round. The ping pong ball begins to morph and melt but then the timer stops….

The guys immediately go for it again and the results…well they speak for themselves! A fiery explosion indeed.

The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that his mission was used as a cover up story to camouflage the military’s real objective of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.

Dr Bob Ballard who led the team that found the wreck of the Titanic back in 1995, admitted that he was only allowed to search for the sunken luxury cruise liner after he located the wrecks of USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and arousing suspicions that at least one of them, Scorpion, may have been sunk by the USSR.

Dr Ballard approached the US Navy for funding to search for the Titanic in 1982 after developing a robotic submarine to search the ocean floor. The Military responded by saying they were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

The oceanographer was given the funding to embark on two expeditions, one to find the wreck of Thresher in 1984 off the eastern coast of the US and another to find Scorpion in the eastern Atlantic.

After the Ballard located the two submarines he only had 12 days to find the Titanic.

“I couldn’t’t tell anybody,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic.

“We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded – our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified.”

Dr Ballard said inspecting the two submarines gave him the idea of finding a trail of debris that could lead him to the main section of the Titanic.

Thresher had imploded deep beneath the surface breaking up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost completely destroyed.

“It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.”

USS Thresher (SSN-593) Submarine

Thresher was at the time, the US Navy’s most advanced attack submarine. She was launched on 9 July 1960, sponsored by Mrs. Frederick B. Warder (wife of the famous Pacific War skipper), and was later commissioned on 3 August 1961, with Commander Dean L. Axene in command.

Thresher sank with all her 129 crew in April 1963 while undergoing deep-diving tests after dockyard repairs.

A surface ship, Skylark, was in contact when the crew reported a high-pressure pipe supplying the nuclear reactor with cooling water had blown. The accident happened at a depth of 1000ft, causing the vessel to sink so deep that the pressure hull imploded.

The loss of the Thresher in 1963 is often considered a watershed event in the implementation of the rigorous submarine safety program SUBSAFE

USS Scorpion (SSN-589) Submarine

USS Scorpion was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy. She was the sixth ship of the U.S. Navy to carry that name and was launched on 19 December 1959, and later commissioned on 29 July 1960 with Commander Norman B. Bessac in command.

On June 5, 1968 Scorpion was declared lost with a crew of 99 onboard. There had been speculation that Scorpion was sunk by Soviet forces however Dr Ballard’s visual examination of the wreck site showed that the most likely cause of its destruction was being hit by a rogue torpedo that it had fired itself.

The Titanic

The Titanic was a luxury ocean liner built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland by White Star Line. At the time of her launch she was the largest passenger steamship in the world.

During her maiden voyage on 14th April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives.

There is no doubt about it, guided ammunitions are changing the way we fight wars. In the days of the Vietnam War, guided ammunitions had already been developed however dumb or iron bombs were still largely in use. These days many munitions have guidance systems ranging from lasers to GPS, some of these systems are even being fitted to unmanned vehicles to enable a totally autonomous attack.

Dumb bombs are what most people imagine when they think of a bomb. There is no way to control the bomb once it has been deployed, they simply fall to the ground and explode, hence the name. Needless to say hitting a target with a dumb bomb is an extremely difficult task and innocent bystanders are often caught up in the carpet bombing technique which is employed.Smart bombs are designed to guide themselves to the target. The concept of this smart weapon is certainly not new. First developed back in 1943 by the Germans, the technology would go through stages of radio-controlled and laser-guided developments before being used on a large scale. The first large-scale use of smart weapons came in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm when they were used by coalition forces against Iraq.

More Information On The Air Force’s Newest Smart bomb Plus Two Videos After The Jump.

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THE END IS NEAR!

Of the month that is. Love it or hate it - we all respect it. Nuclear energy offers a memorizing display of force as seen in the video above. The most powerful and destructive force that man has ever been able to achieve so far. With countries and terrorist threatening to use this power for evil, where does this leave the nuclear future?

South Africa may offer insight and a staging point for the future revolution of nuclear energy. The continents only nuclear power plant is located on its southern tip in no man’s land of Cape Town. It is an obsolete, water cooled reactor that is run by the State. However Eskom is ready to change all that and become the world’s first pebble bed reactor.

Pebble bed reactor promises safer, cleaner, smaller and more affordable power than conventional nuclear power plants. They even say this style reactor is “meltdown-proof” and “walk-away safe.”

“It is physically impossible for it to suffer the kind of accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,” Ferreira says.

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Ever since I was a little kid, I knew this type of technology would eventually surface if it hadn’t already. Below in the video by General Dynamics you can see Trophy Active Defense System in action. It offers an invisible force field for military vehicles that disables incoming RPG rounds.

The system can simultaneously engage several threats, arriving from different directions, is effective on stationary or moving platforms, and is effective against short and long range threats (such as RPGs and ATGM). Trophy was designed to be effective in open or closed terrain, including urban area and can be operated under all weather conditions

Iraq war veteran Sgt. Juan Arredondo can now grasp tennis balls and door knobs with his left hand again, now that he’s been outfitted with a bionic hand that has flexible fingers. This brings new meaning and current implementation to once futuristic themes such as Terminator, Robo Cop and Star Wars.

The 27-year-old former Army soldier, who lost his left hand in 2005 during a patrol in Iraq when a IED exploded through the left side of his vehicle, is one of the first recipients of the i-LIMB. Arredondo was on patrol in Iraq on Feb. 28, 2005, when an explosive device blasted through the left side of his vehicle. As he jumped from the driver’s seat, he noticed that his left hand was still clutching the steering wheel. At San Antonio’s Brooke Army Medical Center, he was stabilized enough to have his amputated arm closed up and readied for a prosthesis. He went through two artificial arms until finally receiving the i-Limb.

“To have this movement, it’s — it’s amazing! My son tells me I’m half robot, half man,”

Arredondo said Monday as he showed off the limb made by Scotland-based Touch Bionics.

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Defense and security has come a long way in recent years, with tragic events like Sept 9/11 the public has seen a sharp increase in security measures worldwide. Now a Florida based start-up dubbed SeaAway (no relation to Segway) has turned their attention to making our ports a lot safer and guarding against terrorist attacks.

To security experts, the immense cargo ships that ferry more than 11 million containers into this country annually are potential Trojan horses each one could easily harbor a WMD (weapons of Mass Destruction), such as a dirty bomb. At present, only once the ships have been unloaded is their cargo subjected to random inspections and radiation scans. This method is outdated and well overdue for an upgrade!

SeaAway has developed a security system that would move cargo screening 14 miles offshore to the safety of the open seas. The plan calls for pairs of 100-foot-wide platforms anchored outside the world’s major ports. Equipped with an array of unmanned surveillance drones and sensors such as RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification), the system monitors for chemical, biological and nuclear traces as ships travel between the platforms. If the sensor flags a suspicious container the Coast Guard is called into action. Robots have played a vital role in the War on Terror as we have seen from our previous posts.

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A three letter abbreviation that’s becoming synonymous with the Iraq War is IDE. Improvised explosive device (IED) is a bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than in conventional military action.The Navy recently pressed for new out-of-the-box technologies that could predict where IED bombs will explode, now the Marines have just ordered 1000 mine resistant, ambush-protected vehicle (MRAP’s) to further save lives on the streets of Iraq.

The Cougar (known in the United Kingdom as “Tempest”, and previously it seems in the US as “Lion” and “Typhoon”), is designed to withstand a 30-pound blast of TNT to either the front or rear axles as well as a 15-pound blast to the center portion of the vehicle. The Cougar Hardened Engineer Vehicle, until 2002 marketed as the Lion, can be configured to complete a wide variety of mission requirements. The new HEV can serve as a mine-proof troop transport vehicle, a law enforcement special response vehicle, a weapons platform, or an escort protection vehicle.

The $490 million contract, which will be the biggest order for MRAP’s so far, calls for 300 Cougar 4 x 4s and 700 of the larger, six-wheeled Cougar 6 x 6s. Whilst no vehicle is completely safe from an IDE the Cougar is better armored than the Humvee and features a V-shaped undercarriage that partially redirects explosive blasts around the vehicle. The Marines field-tested various mine-resistant vehicles before settling on the Cougar. In 2006 this Cougar RG-31 suffered a direct IED hit, but none of the crew were killed.

The Cougar 4 x 4 and 6 x 6 models both have 330-hp diesels, top speeds of 65 mph, a 600-mile range, and seating for 10. The 6 x 6 can haul 14,000 pounds, nearly triple the 4 x 4 max load. Cougar, developed and produced by Force Protection Inc. is a multi-purpose, 12 ton mine protected armored patrol vehicle. The design uses a monocoque, bulletproof and blast-proof capsule fitted with transparent armored glass, which protects the driver and crew from small arms fire, mine blasts and IED.

Typical roles for the vehicle are armored, mine protected troop transport for security, stability and peacekeeping missions, protected weapons platform, law enforcement special response vehicle, counter IED an EOD / Range Clearance vehicle. The vehicle can accommodate 10 passengers in a 4×4 configuration and 16 passengers in a 6×6 configuration. Cougar was selected to serve with the US Marine Corps as a Hardened Engineer Vehicle (HEV), to support engineer mine clearing and explosive ordnance disposal teams deployed in Iraq.

As of June 2006, there are more than 130 Cougars and Buffalos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since their deployment to Iraq in 2003 the Cougar and Buffalo vehicles employed with explosive ordnance disposal teams and engineers units have taken about 1,000 IED hits without a loss of life, said Wayne Phillips, a company vice president in charge of Marine Corps programs. The vehicle has proven to be superior to less protected vehicles, such as the up-armored Humvee or armored trucks.

Bigger plans to order more MRAP’s are still caught up in political controversy however the Pentagon hopes to eventually deploy a total of 7774 MRAPs at the total cost of 8.4 billion dollars. A small price to pay for the lives of our Troops on the streets of Iraq.

Defense Technology on the H Series Cougar Armord Truck

The threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or street bombs is ever growing, especially on the streets of Iraq and detecting them has always been a problem. Now the Navy is trying to take bomb disposal to the next level by requesting proposals and offering grants for new technologies that can predict where bombs will actually be placed.

The office of Naval Research says it is looking for theoretical and technical approaches to:

• Permit the prediction of bomb emplacements
• Identify and localize bomb makers, storage nodes, safe zones and caches
• Identify or predict changing or emerging threat tactics.
• Track components, practices and procedures used in fabrication and assembly.

The project will possibly use any combination of statistical, logical, chemical, and psychological data to predict where the next bomb will be placed and is all part of a broader push to develop “fundamentally new theories, data, concepts, and principles that could one day help U.S. forces detect, neutralize, and guard themselves against improvised bombs.

Other ideas include “advanced sensor networks” to automatically detect bomb-placing, with “minimal” human involvement, technologies to “quickly and remotely destroy explosive devices without necessarily having to detect them” and methods to identify the “behavioral [and] physiological” signatures of the bombs’ “human initiators and observers.”

The closing date for proposals is 20th of July with grants being given sometime before Halloween, perhaps it won’t be too long before this technology is more than just an idea.