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Boot Camp Goes High-Tech

Warrior recruits spoon-fed on video games and MTV are in their element at the Great Lakes Naval Station, where Battle Stations 21 was commissioned in June 2007.

This is not your Disneyland Magic Mountain experience, however. At 157,000 square feet, Battle Stations 21 is one of the base's largest structures. Rising 40 feet – Great Lakes' limit – it extends to 14 feet below grade. This landmark has become Navy boot camp's "signature."

Battle Stations 21 at RTC Great Lakes presents a grueling, 12-hour war-fighting challenge, the final rite of passage that recruits must confront, 350 of them at a time, at the Navy's only boot camp. It implements the most advanced technology available to simulate sometimes intense battle conditions.

Fly Like Batman

How would you like to be dropped out of your plane 25 miles from your projected landing site, and glide to your target in silence and nearly invisible? Who wouldn't want to be a superhero?

Now you can get your way, thanks to Elekroniksystem und Logistik-GmbH (ESG), which has developed carbon fiber wings spanning 1.80 meters that parachutists can manipulate, allowing them to access their targets faster, more safely, from a greater distance and in silence.

Bomb-Sniffing Honeybees

When it comes to the Global War on Terror, honeybees are angling for a spot on the front lines. A recent Los Alamos National Laboratory study has found that honeybees – which have an uncanny sense of smell – can be trained to sniff out explosives, such as IEDs, even in small quantities.

Almost a year ago, scientists at the Los Alamos Stealthy Insect Sensor Project – a name you couldn't make up – announced that they'd developed a method to train ordinary bees to detect explosives. It turns out that bees are pretty smart and will respond to Pavlovian techniques, as entomologist and principal investigator Timothy Haarmann and colleagues have discovered. Project researchers found that when exposed to sugar water, bees will extend their proboscises: tongue-like organs used to suck nectar from flowers. In the study, researchers exposed the bees to the odor of an explosive and then gave them sugar water as a reward. By the end of the training session, the bees anticipated the sugar water and stuck out their proboscises at the smell of a particular explosive.