News Briefs

The U.S. Defense Department is creating a department-wide system to track and manage human subjects in studies the federal government funds. A Web-based application developed by the Office of Naval Research, called the Protections in Research, Oversight Management Information System, will form the basis for the new system.

A new robotic hand, developed by Sandia National Laboratories, mimics the capabilities of a human hand and could help disarm improvised explosive devices.

The U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory trained Marines--for the first time ever--using multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in a convoy. Seven Marines were trained on the Oshkosh Corporation's UGV, which uses the company's TerraMax technology to operate autonomously.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate has unveiled an open source cybersecurity tool for information sharing across the Internet.

The U.S. Army's System of Systems Integration Directorate (SoSI) is seeking participants for the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 13.2 event, which is scheduled to take place at Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range in May 2013. Only mature solutions that focus on SoSI-identified network gaps will be considered.

Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen who think they represent the best-of-the-best of military communicators have an unusual opportunity to prove it.

On Wednesday, the Defense Department (DOD) issued its long-awaited cloud computing strategy. Officials also announced in a memo from Teri Takai, chief information officer for the DOD, that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will oversee the new strategy as "enterprise cloud service broker."

Materials researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new class of nanoporous materials that could lead to more effective and less costly radiation detectors for homeland security inspectors. The new material works with plastic scintillators to make them glow brightly in the presence of charged particles or high-energy photons. Sandia officials say though more work is needed, they are currently seeking commercial partners to license the technology.

The Graph500 executive committee has announced specifications that will better represent ways to rate the large-scale data analytics that are key to high-performance computing. This single-source, shortest-path specification to assess computing performance will measure the closest distance between selected items.

Organizations in Asia, Europe and the United States have created cybersecurity principles to guide government agencies as they establish policies to protect data and networks.