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US Army developing Android-based smartphone framework and apps
The US Army is calling upon Android app developers to help make military life a little less stressful -- and, perhaps, a lot safer. Under a new Army framework known as the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment (CE), third-party developers will be able to create and submit tactical Android apps, using the military's CE Product Developer's Kit. The framework, originally prototyped by the folks over at MITRE, represents the latest phase in the Army's ongoing campaign to incorporate smartphone technology on the battlefield. Any app operating under the CE system will be interoperable across all command systems, and, as you'd expect, will be tightly secured. The kit won't be released to developers until July, but the Army has already begun tinkering with its baseline suite of Mission Command apps, which includes tools designed to facilitate mapping, blue force tracking, and Tactical Ground Reporting. On the hardware side of the equation, the Army is planning to deploy a new handheld known as the Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P. The two-pound JBC-P is essentially a military-friendly smartphone designed to run on a variety of existing radio networks, while supporting the full suite of forthcoming apps. The JBC-P will be tested this October, and will likely be issued on a wider basis in 2013.
Researchers from Harvard and MITRE announce world's first programmable nanoprocessor
We've seen plenty of breakthroughs involving nanowires over the years, but none of those have involved an actual programmable processor -- until now, that is. That particular "world's first" was just announced by a team of researchers from Harvard University and the MITRE Corporation this week, and it's being described as nothing short of a "quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up." As for the processor itself, it consists of an array of nearly 500 germanium nanowires that have been criss-crossed with metal wires on a chip that's just 960 micrometers (or less than 1 millimeter) square. That becomes an actual processor when the researchers run a high voltage through the metal wires and switch the individual intersections off and on at will -- we're simplyfing things a bit, but you get the idea. What's more, the researchers note that the architecture is fully scalable, and promises to allow for the assembly of "much larger and ever more functional nanoprocessors." Head on past the break for the official press release. [Thanks, Chris]
